Call for Papers on “Infrastructuring Green Transitions” for VANDA Conference 2027
We invite paper proposals for our panel “Infrastructuring Green Transitions” at the Vienna Anthropology Days (VANDA) 2027, hosted by the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna, 16-19 February 2027.
The green transition marks a shift away from fossil fuel-based, high-carbon economic activity toward more sustainable systems of production, consumption, and use of energy and other resources. Recent environmental and geopolitical crises have shown that energy, transport, and green urban infrastructures are central to this uneven and contested process. Understanding its complexities and paradoxes requires looking beyond global discourses and national energy and climate policies to examine local consumption practices and infrastructural configurations on the ground.
This panel invites papers that explore how the interplay between the materiality of infrastructure, architectural design and cultures of consumption shapes green transitions amid rapid environmental change and geopolitical insecurity. We ask:
How do local communities perceive and respond to global discourses and national policies framed under the banner of the green transition?
How are environmental impacts and risks weighed and negotiated in the development of new energy sources, infrastructures and urban development projects?
How do social and cultural factors shape diverse practices of energy consumption, transportation and use of urban green spaces?
And how do competing visions of sustainability, security, and development are contested and negotiated?
We welcome papers offering new methodological or theoretical perspectives on the role of infrastructural and environmental politics, materiality and design in shaping green transitions, as well as contributions with a strong ethnographic focus on human entanglements with energy, transport, and urban infrastructures and technologies associated with the green transition. We actively solicit ethnographic case studies, especially from the regions undergoing rapid environmental, political, socio-economic, energy transitions.
Convenors: Olga Povoroznyuk, Alexandra Meyer and Peter Schweitzer.
Deadline for paper proposals: 12 October 2026.
Further information and submission details are available via the VANDA 2027 Call for Papers.
