Anthropocene landscapes? Or, a renewed anthropology of infrastructure for the current times

Monday, September 22, 2025, at 18:00 CEST (doors open at 17:30), in the Aula am Campus (Hof 1.11, i.e., Courtyard 1, Room 11), University of Vienna Campus.

A logging road, an abandoned plantation, an artisanal mine, an impromptu factory — these are the erratic features of a shifting landscape. Nearby, other plans unfurl: a new highway, a smart city, a Special Economic Zone. Surrounding it all: war, displacement, and environmental degradation. Those images conjure up an Anthropocene landscape, that is, a landscape steeped not just in development fantasies but punctuated by the relentless fluctuations of extractive booms and busts. Some might label it a frontier. Alessandro Rippa explores it as an extended infrastructure space.

In this keynote lecture, he argues that extended infrastructure space unveils our planetary crises in ways the notion of “frontier” cannot quite capture. It prompts a rethinking through the anthropology of infrastructure, multispecies studies, and scholarship that accounts for the geological in our everyday lives. This perspective steers us away from apocalyptic narratives bound to the Anthropocene, challenging the exceptionality ascribed to frontier spaces. For those who inhabit these terrains — the disparate communities threading their lives through them — regard this space as ordinary, filled with aspirations, plans, and hopes.

By cultivating this renewed anthropology of infrastructure, Rippa invites us to contemplate both everyday space and (deep) time, as well as spatialities and temporalities that are not only human. This keynote lecture traces a journey across the China-Burma borderlands to examine Anthropocene landscapes as extended infrastructure space.

About the speaker

Alessandro Rippa is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo. His research concerns infrastructure, global circulations, and the environment. He is the PI of the ERC Starting Grant project Amber Worlds: A Geological Anthropology for the Anthropocene (2023-2028).