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- Convenors:
-
Elisabeth Schubiger
(University of Fribourg)
Avery Newell (University of St Andrews)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
Debates around energy transition are often framed in moral binaries, yet ethnographic research shows that people rarely act at extremes. They sustain, repair, and adapt energy systems while navigating moral expectations, economic needs, and environmental uncertainties.
Long Abstract
Debates around energy transition often polarise around moral claims: the urgent need for decarbonisation versus the protection of landscapes and livelihoods, collective responsibility versus individual autonomy, “green dictatorship” versus local control. Yet ethnographic research shows that people rarely act in binary extremes. They sustain, repair, and adapt energy systems within these tensions, navigating moral expectations, economic needs, and environmental uncertainties.
This panel invites anthropological contributions that examine the everyday work of maintaining energy infrastructures (Flower 2004; Barnes 2017; Martínez & Laviolette 2019). What does it mean to keep energy systems running in a world of shifting regulations, markets, and moral claims? How do people and social groups justify, improvise, or care for the systems that power their futures, not as idealists or opponents, but as pragmatic actors negotiating power through resistance or agency?
‘Communities of energy’ (Campbell et al. 2016) are necessarily multi-scalar. Anthropological energy research needs to attend to those scales, their stratification and to the diversity of ethical sensibilities (High & Smith 2019). In this panel, we ask how energy transitions unfold through acts of upkeep and restoring not only infrastructure itself, but also the social and political relationships in which it is embedded (Barnes 2017). We welcome papers that trace how infrastructures and the people who maintain them embody situated, relational, and sometimes ambivalent forms of ethics, grounded in the ongoing work of keeping things going.
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
Based on ethnographic research in Norway’s energy sector, this paper explores ‘moral labour’. It asks: How do energy professionals’ conceptualisations of ‘good’ and ‘indispensable’ work (ethically) sustain hydrocarbon infrastructures in energy transition contexts?
Paper long abstract
In 2018, Norway’s then prime minister Erna Solberg asserted the longevity of the country’s hydrocarbon sector by claiming that “the person who will turn off the lights on the Norwegian shelf [the oil sector] has not yet been born” (Gjerde 2018). Norway is one of Europe’s major hydrocarbon producers while internationally recognised as a climate- and energy transition leader. How are these seemingly contradictory positions reconciled ethically?
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork amongst executives, investors, and senior managers in major Norwegian energy companies, this paper examines how oil and gas infrastructures are morally maintained. Engaging energy ethics (Smith & High 2017; High & Smith 2019), I deploy the concept of ‘moral labour’ to capture the ongoing ethical work through which energy professionals conceptualise and communicate hydrocarbon production as responsible, necessary, and compatible with energy transitions.
I argue that moral labour emerges as energy professionals conceptualise technological innovation, national welfare contributions, petrochemical provisioning, and the supply of energy security as ‘good work’. The notion of ‘moral labour’ aims to demonstrates how fossil fuel infrastructures are sustained and legitimised in energy transition contexts, despite overwhelming scientific evidence linking continued fossil fuel production and consumption to escalating climate harm.
Paper short abstract
In Northeast China, electric-vehicle taxi drivers keep the battery swapping system running by clearing ice, recalibrating range displays, and enduring long queues. This ethnography shows infrastructure is sustained through pragmatic moral negotiation between transition ideals and making a living.
Paper long abstract
China’s electric vehicles and battery-swapping infrastructure are promoted as a replicable pathway for clean mobility through standardized batteries and swapping networks. Yet in wintertime Northeast China, sharp range loss, equipment failures, and hours-long queues reveal the infrastructure’s conditionality and render its reliability on frontline taxi drivers. Drivers absorb friction at the intersection of national climate goals, local economic survival, and everyday environmental uncertainty, navigating moral expectations to enact the energy transition while earning a living. Based on fieldwork in Changchun, this paper examines how EV taxi drivers keep the battery-swapping system running through everyday maintenance. Drawing on journey logs co-produced with drivers and field observations, the paper adopts a fragmented narrative form to convey the intermittency of breakdowns and the fractured temporality of waiting. The analysis conceptualises these maintenance practices as pragmatic upkeep through which drivers navigate polarised moral claims in the energy transition. In doing so, they sustain the system’s everyday usability and infrastructural continuity while continually accounting for compromises between environmental ideals and economic survival. From within this maintenance work, broader frictions become legible: between state infrastructure and private survival, between national climate goals and regional material conditions, and between inherited practices and uncertain futures. These lived negotiations complicate binary moral framings by showing how collective aspirations are realised through individual endurance. I therefore argue for an ethics of care that acknowledges embodied costs, attends to precarity, and rethinks how responsibility and response-ability are distributed across the frontlines of transition.
Paper short abstract
Water-rich Swiss Alpine cantons host diverse small hydropower projects. This paper examines how families and collectives sustain these installations as shifting knowledge, laws, markets and family ties shape the everyday work that keeps energy flowing.
Paper long abstract
“Green”, “small-scale” and “locally owned” are the keywords that shape debates on desired energy futures. Yet in the Swiss Alpine cantons, small-scale and locally owned hydropower production has been practiced for more than a century. Private, collective and public ownership of land and streams has given rise to a wide array of management arrangements. In the Alpine canton of Uri a diversity of hydropower projects exists: from the smallest turbines on summer pastures, to private hydropower stations operating on customary water rights, to large hydropower plants.
This paper focuses on small-scale hydropower plants (up to 100 kW), owned and managed by individuals, families and collectives. Some of these plants have been in operation for more than a century, others were built within the last 40 years. Turbines and generators are typically located in house basements or in small huts adjacent to the main residence, maintaining a distance between the noisy machinery and family life.
In this paper, I examine how families and collectives organize—or fail to organize—themselves to keep the hydropower infrastructures functioning. I discuss the challenges of maintaining flows of knowledge across generations and genders, the fragility of neighborhood networks, and legal and market uncertainties. Beyond the polarized discourse on green transformation, my research reveals the everyday engagements with machines, weather, water and land, as well as with the complex family ties, positionalities, moral obligations and affects that at times enable—and at times hinder—the flow of energy.
Paper short abstract
This paper shows how Bucharest’s district heating system endures through continuous practices of maintenance. Provisional fixes and emergency labor sustain the access to hot water and heating amid material decay and institutional fragmentation.
Paper long abstract
In Bucharest’s district heating system, repair is not a response to breakdown but the labor through which infrastructure endures. The city operates the largest centralized heating network in the European Union, built during the socialist era to ensure universal access to hot water and heating. Since the 1990s, disinvestment and fragmented governance have left the system in chronic decline. Rather than being renewed through modernization, it persists through continual acts of repair that stabilize an increasingly fragile network, albeit temporarily.
Based on ethnographic research with municipal pipe repair crews, this paper examines maintenance as labor characterized by provisional fixes (cârpeală), emergency interventions, and improvisation. Workers remain permanently on call, responding to leaks while navigating bureaucratic procedures that delay action and diffuse responsibility. Their work unfolds at the intersection of material urgency and administrative constraint, showing how infrastructure is sustained through negotiation among decaying matter, institutional limits, and embodied expertise. Through these practices, crews maintain both the circulation of heat and the expectation that the system will continue to function.
While energy transition and decarbonization shape policy and funding priorities, they remain largely detached from the conditions workers confront underground. I argue that repair labor enacts a pragmatic ethics of endurance rather than transformation. Often resented yet indispensable, repair workers negotiate invisibility through humor, self-stylization, and collective pride in their ability to 'hold the city together.' By foregrounding everyday repair, the paper shows how energy systems persist through uneven, morally charged, and deeply relational labor.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how households maintain domestic equilibria after heat pump retrofitting. Visual ethnography reveals everyday practices of repair, care and tinkering, showing how affect, moral values, and technical performance are circulate in ambivalent, relational infrastructures.
Paper long abstract
Discourse on the energy transition disproportionately focusses on the adoption of green energy technologies, but rarely investigates the everyday work of maintaining a domestic equilibrium once such technologies are introduced. This paper examines the maintenance of domestic energy infrastructure through visual ethnographic fieldwork with households navigating the installation and use of heat pumps in existing homes.
We argue that technological change in households is not a simple substitution of devices, but a process of socio-material reconfiguration that unsettles domestic life. Heat pump retrofitting reshapes household practices, alters sensory experiences through fluctuating heating cycles and new forms of noise, and redefines attachment to the home, turning it into a site of ongoing experimentation or contestation. Maintenance emerges as a relational practice through which households negotiate competing demands, such as care responsibilities, expert authority, and ethical concerns.
Households engage in forms of everyday maintenance which exceed formal notions of repair, including anthropomorphising devices, tinkering with settings and apps, delegating control to experts, or deliberately withdrawing attention. These practices are pragmatic ways of sustaining domestic life under conditions of technical uncertainty, competing responsibilities, and polarized discourses on sustainable energy.
Drawing on Heideggerian distinctions between the ready-to-hand and present-at-hand, the paper traces how heat pumps shift between background infrastructure and matter of concern triggered by destabilization of the domestic equilibrium. By foregrounding retrofitting as an ongoing process of upkeep rather than a linear transition, this paper advances understanding of energy infrastructures as sustained through ambivalent, partial, and often invisible forms of everyday labour.