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- Convenors:
-
Valeska Flor
(University of Tübingen)
Victoria Huszka (University of Bonn)
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- Format:
- Panel
Short Abstract:
This panel examines how "unwriting" can address the violence embedded in infrastructures. By emphasizing forms like heat, toxic, and symbolic violence, we seek to challenge existing perspectives on the research of climate justice, resilience, and transition.
Long Abstract:
The climate crisis demands an urgent rethinking of societal structures, revealing the entanglements of power relations, ethical imperatives, and material infrastructures. This panel explores how unwriting, understood as the process of reshaping dominant narratives in scientific discourses on climate, can address these challenges. Infrastructures, often presented as neutral, are sites of power where violence is embedded, reinforcing hegemonic control over marginalized populations. Activism challenges established hegemonies, confronting the moralization of climate discourse shaped by lobbyism and political interests. In the redesign of existing infrastructures diverging interests become visible. Due to their entanglements with power relations these processes often result in various forms of infrastructural violence (Rodgers/O’Neill 2012), including e.g. heat violence (Hamstead 2024), toxic violence (Nading 2020) as well as symbolic violence (Bourdieu 1977) and its intersection with physical violence (Verweijen 2020) – each coming with their own temporalities (Glaab/Stuvøy 2024).
Concepts like “energy poverty”, “climate justice”, “sustainability”, “resilience” and “just transition” are deeply entrenched in the political discourse on the climate crisis. By foregrounding the forms of violence embedded in these settings, we seek to dismantle dominant paradigms that render these harms invisible. Through this lens, we propose that unwriting can be used to reimagine existing theoretical frameworks.
We call for papers that for example
– apply decolonial perspectives to explore the unseen and the non-linear character of violence
– theorize concepts that center experiences of slow violence (Nixon 2011)
– focus on conflicts involving multiple forms of violence surrounding energy, housing, mobility, waste, health, digital and water infrastructures.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper Short Abstract:
Looking at instances of land grabbing in Romania, the paper engages with Feminist Political Ecology to unravel the micro-politics of land dispossession. The analysis highlights how local land grabbers, leveraging their proximity and embeddedness within the community, engage in the process of dispossession that unfolds through slow violence.
Paper Abstract:
Land grabbing has been at the core of many recent debates, as the wave of large-scale land acquisitions continues to reshape rural landscapes, disrupt traditional livelihoods, and exacerbate social and environmental harms. Although more and more research emerges on the many consequences of land grabbing, most studies tend to focus on overt conflicts and highly visible cases, defined by their scale and immediate effects. Yet, less sensational instances remain overlooked, and the gradual process in which dispossession takes place remains invisible. Using a qualitative methodology, this research is grounded in two case studies conducted in two regions of Transylvania. The empirical focus is placed on post-socialist Romania, the EU country with the highest number of peasants, despite land grabbing drastically increasing in the last decade. Drawing on interviews with activists, local authorities and peasants, the paper seeks to answer the question: How do peasants experience dispossession? The focus is placed on the forms of violence that emerge in the process, considering the role that gender, age, and class play in these conflicts.
The paper engages with Feminist Political Ecology and Emotional Geographies to unravel the micro-politics of land dispossession. The analysis highlights how local land grabbers, leveraging their proximity and embeddedness within the community, engage in the process of dispossession that unfolds through slow violence. The findings suggest that land grabbers exploit the emotional attachment of people to their land as well as their vulnerabilities in order to secure control over the land.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper analyses how transition to renewable energy is being shaped and implemented in Istria (Croatia), strained by inefficient power infrastructure and increase in energy consumption. This is fuelling pressure to close local coal-fired power station, offering various energopreneurs to co-create new, renewable energy related fields of power.
Paper Abstract:
Over the past two decades, the energy transition in Croatia has been shaped by the strategies and interests of both regional and international large capital and dominant political centres. The discourses about the need to secure enough energy was followed by the debates about the negative aspects of new renewable energy infrastructure on environment. This prove to be in alignment with our ongoing research on energy sovereignty in Croatia, showing simultaneously how appropriate renewable energy infrastructure, or the lack of it, is pivotal in green transition project.
This paper aims to analyse how transition to renewables is being shaped and implemented in Istria, one of the economically most developed Croatian regions, still remaining at the periphery of EU. However, despite investments being made into, mostly, tourist infrastructure, Istria faces challenges due to outdated and inefficient power infrastructure, much of which dates to the socialist era. This infrastructure is further strained by a sharp increase in energy consumption during the tourist season. Despite these challenges, local administrations lack clear strategies to implement effective solutions, resulting in heated debates between private investors, state interests, local stakeholders, and grassroots initiatives. We perceive this lack of adequate infrastructure as a special form of infrastructural violence, fuelled by the pressure to close the coal-fired Plomin Power Station. This pressure creates narratives of urgency while simultaneously offering a set of opportunities for various actors, including energopreneours to participate in the creation of new field of power, renewable energy related.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper aim is to elaborate the concepts of infrastructure violence and discuss the concepts usefulness according today’s conflict in constructions of wind farm. The discussion is based on ethnographically fieldwork and ethnography on social media, in addition to qualitative interviews.
Paper Abstract:
In the social and cultural theory of ‘infrastructure violence’ the concept is grounded in the material violence of the city’s infrastructure, described sometimes as technical apparatus managed by civil engineers and urban planners. In scope of the field of infrastructure violence the social consequence of the violence is discussed due to the social life and everyday life of the city.
Wind farm, on the other hand, are built in windy places, in the mountain areas or the coastline, located in the region and far away from the city. In today’s highly tempered conflicts of wind farm and cleantech industry, all over Europe, the violence and harm are unwritten and told often to be done against the nature rather than the community and the people and those who stay in the area.
This paper will mainly discuss the concept of ‘infrastructure violence’ along with other concepts of conflicts. Further, it will discuss and elaborate infrastructure violence according to the materiality of the region, due to the construction of green cleantech installations, and particularly the construction of wind farms. The discussion is based on empirical studies and case studies of several wind farms, and data collected from ethnographically fieldwork and social media, in addition to qualitative interviews.
Paper Short Abstract:
This study examines the temporalities of oil spills in Guanabara Bay, focusing on the 2024 Suruí River spill and the 2000 pipeline disaster. Drawing on the memories of artisanal fishers and crab catchers, we explore how these communities connect small, present-day spills to the 2000 catastrophe and global climate change. By intertwining human narratives with the ecological impacts of chemical residues, we highlight how oil spills reverberate beyond isolated events. This analysis bridges past and present, local and global, to interrogate the intertwined relationships between industry, environment, and human and more-than-human lives in the region.
Paper Abstract:
On October 2, 2024, a tanker truck collided with a trailer on the Rio de Janeiro metropolitan ring road in the city of Magé, overturning in the process. This section of the highway crosses the Suruí River, a vital water body for families of crab catchers and artisanal fishers who depend on the lives sustained by its waters. The accident caused a chemical spill that flowed into the riverbed, killing fish and crustaceans and severely impacting local communities. This oil spill evoked memories of another large-scale environmental disaster that occurred on January 18, 2000, when a crude oil transport pipeline burst, releasing 1.3 million liters of oil into Guanabara Bay. This presentation examines the temporality of oil spills in the region and the connections between the local petrochemical industry and global climate change. Drawing on the memories of fishers and crab catchers, who link small present-day spills to the 2000 catastrophe and global warming, we weave a narrative that bridges past and present, local and global. By interlacing human memories with the ecological impacts of chemical residues, we aim to demonstrate that large and small oil spills are not isolated incidents but reverberate through their material and ecological consequences. We propose to reflect on the multiple temporalities that shape the relationships between industry, environment, and human and more-than-human ways of life in Guanabara Bay.
Paper Short Abstract:
Expert understandings of climate change adaptation tend to ignore informal everyday responses to its local impacts. This presentation examines DIY strategies used by Czech city dwellers to adapt to heatwaves, drought and energy crisis, and attempts to challenge formal discourses.
Paper Abstract:
In expert discourses, adaptation to climate change is often understood as top-down decision-making and/or searching for expert solutions. In addition, household adaptation to climate change commonly means conscious adopting of technological solutions distributed through the market (Ferenčuhová 2022). To the contrary, everyday and DIY practices that help people in different contexts to adjust to the local expressions of climate change and to associated challenges (such as heatwaves, drought, but also energy crisis) are undermined in expert discourses as irrelevant temporary „coping responses“ (Porter et al., 2014). Examples include practices of collecting and reusing water in the households without adopting expert technologies, energy and cost-efficient strategies to keep one’s home cool on a hot day (e.g., through sophisticated ventilating), or DIY retrofits in one’s home to save energy. In this presentation, I will focus on various everyday and DIY strategies people in Czech cities adopt in their homes in response to climate change (however, without necessarily identifying changing climate as the issue at stake). I ask if and how they oppose expert and top-down approaches and I observe conflicts as well as synergies between “formal” and “informal” solutions. Finally, I argue that expert discourses on climate change adaptations need some rewriting to stop ignoring everyday and DIY practices and their transformative potential.
The presentation departs from my previous article „Inconspicuous adaptations to climate change in everyday life“ (Ferenčuhová 2022, Journal of Consumer Culture) and is based in my ongoing research covering DIY reconstructions of prefabricated wooden houses in the Czech Republic.
Paper Short Abstract:
This paper explores the lived realities of energy poverty in the Czech Republic during the 2022 energy crisis, driven by energy company collapses, the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. Through ethnographic research, it examines grassroots mutual aid initiatives, particularly solidarity insulation brigades (zateplovací brigády) organized by Energie Lidem, a coalition advocating systemic solutions. These brigades teach and share insulation techniques, fostering networks of solidarity that challenge neoliberal framings of energy poverty as an individual failure. By situating energy poverty within frameworks of slow violence (Nixon 2011) and infrastructural violence (Rodgers/O’Neill 2012), this study highlights its entanglement with systemic crises, such as inadequate housing, regional disparities, and socio-economic inequalities. It demonstrates how collective action transforms understandings of energy poverty, disrupting dominant narratives while rendering visible the intersecting structures of harm that perpetuate it.
Paper Abstract:
This paper examines the lived realities of energy poverty in the Czech Republic during the 2022 energy crisis, driven by energy company collapses, the pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. Surging energy prices pushed over half of Czech households into financial distress, reflecting a broader European crisis in which 34 million people face energy poverty, contributing to tens of thousands of excess winter deaths annually.
Through ethnographic research, this study explores grassroots mutual aid responses, focusing on solidarity insulation brigades (zateplovací brigády) organized by Energie Lidem, a coalition advocating systemic solutions. These brigades teach communities basic insulation techniques, which participants then share further, fostering networks of solidarity that challenge neoliberal framings of energy poverty as an individual failure. This collective action reframes energy poverty outside narrow, official definitions, revealing its entanglements with interconnected crises, including inadequate housing, racialized marginalization, regional healthcare disparities, and systemic inequalities.
By situating energy poverty within the frameworks of slow violence (Nixon 2011) and infrastructural violence (Rodgers/O’Neill 2012), this paper aligns with the panel’s focus on “unwriting.” It illustrates how collective initiatives transform understandings of energy poverty and its solutions, while uncovering the broad range of intersecting factors that produce and perpetuate it. In doing so, the study highlights the potential of grassroots responses to disrupt dominant narratives, rendering visible the systemic harms and structural crises that cannot be addressed in isolation.