Presentation short abstract

The presentation examines how infrastructures for food provision set up by French activist movement 'Les Soulèvements de la Terre' help both dismantling capitalist infrastructures and prefiguring a post-capitalist transformation that combines political autonomy with ecological restoration.

Presentation long abstract

The presentation focuses on insurgent food provisioning networks that corrode the infrastructures of the agro-industrial complex—farms, granaries, and canteens managed by activists. I conceptualise these initiatives as ‘alimentary infrastructures’, a definition foregrounding their life-sustaining capacity. Such infrastructures not only offer an entry point into the materialities of post-capitalist struggles but also crystallise strategic issues for grassroots movements.

From its creation, 'Les Soulèvements de la Terre' has placed ‘dismantling’ at the core of its ideological corpus and repertoire. Resistance to infrastructural harm, their leitmotiv, enables highly disruptive actions to halt development projects. The group thus recently established the ‘Uprisings Granaries’, a network of food provision schemes supplying camps, strikes, and occupations. These initiatives, based on communitarian self-organisation, shift control over subsistence away from both state and market.

Simultaneously, they embody the group’s commitment to ecological restoration and highlight creative techniques to repair the metabolic rift. Activist food systems prefigure post-capitalist economies by discarding profit, upholding solidarity, and establishing alternative relations with non-humans through food production, circulation, and consumption. These practices pursue human-centred autonomy without obstructing nature’s regenerative force. Hence, infrastructures become a strategic tool for both anti-capitalist dismantling and post-capitalist repair.

However, the nature of these infrastructures warrants critical examination. Tensions emerge as material arrangements are crafted and negotiated by activists. Farms, granaries, and canteens become sites of conflict revealing disagreements over agricultural models, diets, and relations with local territories and non-humans. Decisions on development and maintenance thus expose divergent strategies and shape alliances with activist groups and residents.

Presentation short abstract

Reflecting on the 2021 logging blockades at Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek in Canada, this paper explores the potentials and pitfalls of blockade infrastructures, prompting us to consider how distinctions between colonial and anticolonial infrastructures are made.

Presentation long abstract

In the summer of 2021, blockade actions in the remote watershed of Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek on Vancouver Island brought logging activities to a standstill in what became known as the largest civil disobedience action in Canadian history. Using creative lockdown techniques, blockaders exploited chokepoints along the province’s extensive web of logging roads – a settler infrastructural network designed for extraction stretching across and through the province’s mountainous terrain. However, just as blockaders immobilized material movements, they also made use of these same colonial infrastructures to produce new patterns of circulation. An elaborate and highly creative system of counter-infrastructures – including numerous strategically located camps, communication systems, governance structures, and protocols – was created to provision the thousands of forest defenders who converged on the territories of the Pacheedaht and Huu-ay-aht First Nations.

Based on extensive interviews with forest defenders, this paper explores the potentials and pitfalls of blockade infrastructures. Blockades are spatial-political technologies intended to disrupt and inhibit certain targeted forms of movement while enabling other movements of bodies, materials, and information. This was true of many infrastructures of blockade at Ada’itsx/Fairy Creek, including the digital and remote sensing platforms that made protesters geographically nimble while reproducing patriarchal relations and colonial onto-epistemologies. Through exploring the affordances and ambivalences of blockade infrastructures, we challenge easy binary distinctions between colonial and anticolonial infrastructures amid heated struggles over the political forests of the West Coast.

Presentation short abstract

This paper analyzes environmental impact assessment in northern Canada as both an infrastructure of dispossession and a tool for organizing against unwanted extraction.

Presentation long abstract

Environmental impact assessment in northern Canada emerged alongside the negotiation of comprehensive land claim agreements. Between 1984 and 2006, co-managed impact assessment agencies were established across most of the territorial north. Although framed in liberal terms as a tool for harmonizing Indigenous and settler knowledges, achieving sustainability, and balancing economic, environmental, and social objectives, many Indigenous signatories to land claim agreements understood impact assessment to be a crucial tool for exercising control over decision-making about extractive development in their territories, alongside comprehensive land use planning. In practice, however, final decision authority over extractive development remains in the hands of the state in most areas, land use plans have not been approved, and impact assessment agencies overwhelmingly recommend project approval, even in cases with significant forecast impacts to wildlife, traditional economies, harvesting, and Indigenous rights. This paper analyzes impact assessment as both an infrastructure of dispossession and as a tool for organizing against unwanted extraction. At a time when impact assessment infrastructures are being hollowed out or suspended in service of accelerated project approval, it stakes out a non-reformist reform agenda for northern impact assessment, drawing on analysis of the political-economic conditions under which impact assessment emerged and the conditions under which northern Indigenous organizations have successfully resisted unwanted extraction.

Presentation short abstract

This paper argues that the terminal crises facing Cuba’s core infrastructural systems occasion a generative opportunity to think through the complexities of the idea that “building new worlds requires building new infrastructures.”

Presentation long abstract

As Cuba’s ageing energy grid teeters on the brink of collapse, routine blackouts have returned as a feature of everyday life, stirring memories of the darkest chapters of the “special period” that followed the collapse of the socialist bloc in the early 1990s. This paper proposes that Cuba's multifaceted contemporary infrastructural crisis occasions a new opportunity to think through the complexities of the idea that “building new worlds requires building new infrastructures.” While the Cuban Revolution’s efforts to construct a highly functional social infrastructure are well documented, far less attention has been paid to its inability to construct a correspondingly functional set of physical infrastructures. Today, this failure is perhaps more transparent than ever, as basic “hard” infrastructures are menaced by unprecedented levels of dysfunction. As Cuba’s socialist system enters its seventh decade, it has become increasingly clear that its efforts to build a new kind of “world” have had to rely on a set of physical infrastructures that were inherited from precisely the “world” that it sought to replace. This paper considers what this example can teach us about the limits and possibilities of relying on the old in insurrectionary efforts to usher in the new. In doing so, it argues that the terminal crises facing Cuba’s core infrastructural systems offer generative illustrations of the immense complexity of sustaining resistance in the absence of reliable infrastructure.

Presentation short abstract

This paper offers a critical comparison of two prevailing forms of digital resistance infrastructures: virtual, open-source collaboration stacks emphasizing dispersed data hosting, and autonomous server projects hosted in physical community spaces emphasizing ecological and collective care.

Presentation long abstract

In our era of corporate digital centralization and mass surveillance, autonomous digital infrastructures are crucial both for supporting resistance actions, by hosting data networks for sensitive conversations that cannot be surveilled, and as ongoing acts of resistance themselves. Autonomous digital infrastructure projects largely fall into one of the following categories: virtual peer-to-peer collaboration stacks that allow participants to share, maintain, and modify novel source code (known as git) across self-hosted ‘node’ servers without relying on corporate platforms, or collectively maintained physical server projects that offer self-hosted and self-organized computational infrastructures. These infrastructures mutually support one another – git is required for servers to do their work, and server projects extend the reach of git collaboration – but they evidence distinct political logics. Virtual stacks enable individualized server hosting, emphasizing infrastructures that are open-source, non-exclusive, and radically dispersed, whereas autonomous server projects are ecologically situated, require collective care, and tend to digital infrastructures as physical community resource hubs. Taking the virtual stack ‘radicle’ and the server project Constant (in Brussels) as case studies, this paper uses interviews, online records of meetups and actions, informal publications, and virtual participant observation to offer a critical comparison of these infrastructural forms. This sheds light on governance models that underline autonomous digital infrastructures seeking longevity, and it invites us to consider the following questions: Does the social vision of resistance infrastructures require homogeneity to be effective? And how might friction or difference in political vision be productive for resistance?

Presentation short abstract

While extractivism produce environmental toxicity in natural resource enclaves, it provokes significant resistance. Focusing on 'Kpo Fire'- artisanal crude oil refining in the Niger Delta, this paper shows how pollution and environmental resistance can paradoxically become two sides of the same coin

Presentation long abstract

Toxic forms of resource extraction produce far-reaching infrastructural and environmental violence, which shape the everyday lives of marginalized communities in natural resource enclaves, particularly in the global South. While the root causes of ‘toxic extractivism’ have been traced to colonial histories of capitalist expansion, this paper examines how these historical legacies have endured in contemporary times, reproducing themselves in localized variants. With a focus on ‘Kpo Fire’ - artisanal crude oil refining in the Niger Delta, the paper argues that the historical legacies of Nigeria’s ‘petro-capitalism’ have fostered the emergence of informal oil economies as a form of environmental resistance albeit a localized variant of ‘toxic extractivism’. Drawing on ethnography from communities of oil extraction, the article unpacks ‘Kpo Fire’ as a case of localized ‘toxic extractivism’ shaped by a combination of historical legacies of pollution, socio-economic deprivation, and local agency in the region. By situating ‘Kpo Fire’ within the wider debates of ‘toxic extractivism’ and 'environmental resistance', it foregrounds how Niger Delta communities navigate, contest, and occasionally normalize environmental toxicity, challenging simplistic representations of these communities as merely victims or perpetrators.

Presentation short abstract

Infrastructural violence is bound to the abandonment of racialized lives. We theorise infrastructure as transformed land to shed light on how urban communities organise against infrastructural violence, showing how reparative politics extends beyond monetary compensation and land claims.

Presentation long abstract

This paper presents the theoretical framework of our edited book project, in preparation, on reparative urban infrastructures. The book collates stories from several urban contexts across Africa, The United States, Latin America, Southeast Asia and Australia, shared via two workshops in 2025. In these events, community organisers and their academic collaborators discussed the range of practices and place-based strategies through which urban infrastructure is reclaimed, repaired, repurposed, and reimagined and what this means for the possibility of abolishing and remaking (infra)structures of harm in cities.

We begin our theorisation with the recognition that infrastructural violence in cities is bound to, and a manifestation of the abandonment of racialized lives. Hence, a politics of abolition and reparations, as both historically located and future oriented, must centre interventions into these urban sites and infrastructures. To clarify the relational and material stakes of this intervention, we propose to understand urban infrastructure as transformed land (echoing UPE’s formulation of cities as transformed nature). Thus, acts of reclaiming and remaking urban infrastructure open new ways for thinking about reparative possibilities: building on but also moving beyond monetary compensation and ‘land back’ claims.

The paper presents vignettes of reparative infrastructural work across contexts, from Sydney, Minneapolis, Santiago, Cape Town, and more, to illustrate how communities are making reparative urban futures for themselves. Taken together, these stories address creative strategies for resisting cycles of (infra)structural violence and methods for actively reclaiming, intervening into, and reimagining these as sites of healing, care, and worldmaking.

Presentation short abstract

Infrastructural violence is pervasive, yet infrastructures are widely asserted as basic human rights. We advance the notion of convivial infrastructure to overcome the impasse presented by the simultaneous indispensability of infrastructure and the socio-environmental violences that attend it.

Presentation long abstract

Critical scholarship has profoundly reshaped infrastructure studies, exposing the multiple forms of injustice embedded in infrastructural development, operation, decay, and decommissioning. Political ecologists and aligned scholars have productively illuminated how infrastructures can produce environmental destruction, human and other-than-human displacement, pollution, livelihood loss, socio-cultural alienation, resource extraction, and land grabbing. Yet, policymakers and industry stakeholders continue to justify and demand even more infrastructure. This apparent contradiction reflects a basic condition of modern life: networked electricity, water, mobility, and communication are now indispensable, yet the costs of such services are borne unequally while access and availability remain highly inequitable. As infrastructures are asserted as basic human rights, we confront a dilemma: Must we accept the life-curtailing effects of infrastructural development and decay for some in order to secure the networked services we have collectively become unable to live without?

We advance the notion of convivial infrastructure as a way to overcome this impasse. Drawing on cases regarding water resources management and renewable energy in South and Southeast Asia, we consider what characterizes infrastructures that support life and engender more livable worlds. Rather than offer a universal blueprint, we mobilize the concept of ‘heterogeneous infrastructure configurations’ to argue that convivial infrastructures must be responsive to and situated within their socio-political contexts and as attentive to non-human as human well-being. We introduce convivial infrastructure as both an analytical lens and a political project that reimagines infrastructural systems as sites of justice, care, repair, and collective flourishing.

Presentation short abstract

This paper examines dismantling processes of fossil infrastructures through the case of a coal-fired power plant and the disputes over its enduring materialities. It shows that these material legacies may deepen territorial inequalities yet also become grounds for contestation and experimentation.

Presentation long abstract

As Western societies increasingly commit to green energy futures, the viability of fossil infrastructures is called into question, posing numerous challenges in their dismantling and possible repurposing, as well as in the management of their material remnants and enduring toxic legacies. Indeed, energy transitions are not merely about substituting resources—such as renewables for fossil fuels—but require confronting the persistent and context-specific materiality of former fossil infrastructures. This paper addresses these challenges through the empirical case study of a coal-fired power plant in a historically carbon-intensive region of the Catalan Pyrenees. Once emblematic of “national modernization”, the now-abandoned plant stands at the intersection of ruination, environmental urgency, and speculative promises attached to alternative energy projects. By tracing the environmental disputes surrounding its existence and afterlives, the paper approaches infrastructural dismantling as a profoundly political process that exposes scientific-technical fissures and social inequalities, while also opening space for the resignification of these “future-takings” into possibilities for alternative “future-makings”. Drawing on recent scholarship, the paper illustrates how late-industrial environments may be marked by exhaustion, but they are hardly inert. Infrastructural ruination can stir collective agency, mobilizing people to dispute and reinterpret industrial material legacies. The paper thus shows that dismantling processes can become sites of creative retrofitting where the fraying fantasies of industrial order unravel and possibilities emerge for experiments in living otherwise.

Presentation short abstract

This paper explores the “right not to repair” as an infrastructural form of resistance. Drawing on post-growth and degrowth research, it examines how refusing expansion, maintenance, or renewal can open political space for alternative socio-ecological futures.

Presentation long abstract

Infrastructures are conventionally imagined as systems that must be expanded, upgraded, or repaired to sustain economic growth and social order. Yet in a world marked by ecological limits, stranded assets, and declining resource availability, such assumptions no longer hold. Building on my recent work on degrowth and post-growth infrastructures, this paper theorises the “right not to repair” as an emerging mode of infrastructural resistance—one that challenges the political, institutional, and cultural forces compelling societies to maintain or revive infrastructures that are socially harmful, materially unsustainable, or economically obsolete. The 'right not to repair' reframes decline, decommissioning, and deliberate non-maintenance not as failures, but as collective refusals of the growth paradigm embedded in socio-technical systems. Drawing conceptually on Science and Technology Studies, political ecology, and socio-technical transitions, and empirically on research conducted in Italy (ILVA/Taranto), Japan (Fukushima and Kaminoseki), and Spain’s energy and mobility sectors, the paper examines how communities, activists, and local institutions negotiate the politics of not repairing: from resisting airport expansions and energy megaprojects to contesting the forced preservation of polluting or dangerous industrial infrastructures. I argue that the right not to repair constitutes a form of infrastructural dissent that disrupts the temporality of growth—its assumptions of perpetuity, renewal, and inevitability. As such, it expands the political ecology of infrastructure by foregrounding practices of abandonment, care, and sufficiency. Ultimately, this conceptualisation opens a new horizon for imagining post-growth futures grounded not in innovation and expansion, but in selective letting-go as a legitimate socio-political choice.

Presentation short abstract

Through an analysis of infrastructural disruptions caused by flooding in the Bow Valley during the summer of 2013, this paper introduces the concept of other-than-human refusal. It suggests that other-than-human agency has the power to reject settler infrastructure and generate new futures.

Presentation long abstract

In the summer of 2013, the Bow River in Southern Alberta, Canada experienced a significant high-water event caused by a large rainstorm which had widespread impacts on infrastructure throughout its watershed. Affected communities along the river included Banff national park, the town of Canmore, city of Calgary, and the Siksika First Nation reserve. There was significant flooding throughout the region which damaged buildings, roads, rail lines, and other critical infrastructure of the settler state. However, viewed through an other-than-human lens, these moments of infrastructural disruption caused by the high waters can be interpreted as generative acts which have the capacity to refresh the land. Throughout the watershed, as the Bow River and its tributaries reorganised their morphological bodies through the inundation of old stream channels and the formation of new watercourses, they created a landscape primed for the inception of emergent ecologies. These reorganised landscapes can influence both human and other-than-human worlds. Using this flood as a case study, this paper introduces the concept of other-than-human refusal, suggesting that the infrastructural disruptions caused by the agency of the waters of the Bow Valley can be interpreted as a rejection of settler colonial infrastructure. Not only did the flooding cause discontinuities to the infrastructure of the settler state, but it also fostered emergent ecological futures and instigated productive interspecies dialogues and collaborations. Bringing together frameworks from Indigenous studies and posthuman theory, this paper seeks to broaden understandings of infrastructure and refusal, calling for a reimagining of landscapes that embrace other-than-human agency.