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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.
This Panel has so far received 1 paper proposal(s).
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