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.

Propose paper