Conference program
The conference will open on Monday, September 22, 2025, with a keynote lecture by Alessandro Rippa (University of Oslo), titled Anthropocene Landscapes? Or, a Renewed Anthropology of Infrastructure for the Current Times. The keynote will begin at 18:00 CEST in the Aula am Campus (Hof 1, Room 11) at the University of Vienna Campus, with doors opening at 17:30 CEST. It will be followed by a welcome reception.
Over the following two days (September 23 – 24, 2025), the conference will continue with presentations organized into thematic parallel sessions at the University of Vienna Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology (4th floor of the Neues Institutgebäude – NIG, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna). The program will conclude on Wednesday, September 24, 2025, by 16:00 CEST.
An optional dinner is planned for Tuesday evening, September 23, 2025. This gathering will provide an excellent opportunity for networking and fostering both disciplinary and interdisciplinary collaborations in infrastructure research. Please note that this networking dinner requires separate reservation and payment.
Conference schedule
Please note that the program and schedule below are preliminary and subject to change. A PDF version is available here. The finalized version of the program will be shared closer to the event date.
OPENING – Monday, September 22, 2025
Location: Aula am Campus, Hof 1, Room 11, Campus of the University of Vienna, 1090 Vienna.
| 17:30 | Doors open |
| 18:00 – 19:30 | Keynote by Alessandro Rippa |
| 19:30 – 21:00 | Reception |
DAY 1 – Tuesday, September 23, 2025
Location: Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Neues Institutgebäude (NIG), 4th Floor, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna.
| 09:00 – 10:40 | 1.1: Mediating Spaces, Shifting Digital Lives | 1.2: More-than-Human Entanglements | 1.3: Geopolitics and Political Ecology |
| 10:40 – 11:10 | Coffee break | — | — |
| 11:10 – 12:50 | 2.1: Ways of Knowing, Worlds of Being: Epistemologies and Ontologies in Dialogue | 2.2: Infrastructuring Energy Transitions | 2.3: Scaling Infrastructures: From Emissions to Emotions (Part I) |
| 12:50 – 14:20 | Lunch break | — | — |
| 14:20 – 16:00 | 3.1: Adapting in Urban and Rural Environments | 3.2: Mining and Infrastructure or The Built Environment of Extractivism | 3.3: Politics of Dis-connection |
| 16:00 – 16:30 | Coffee break | — | — |
| 16:30 – 18:10 | 4.1: Cultural and Food Practices Across (Un-)built Landscapes | 4.2: Infrastructuring Climate Futures | 4.3: Affective and Sentient Infrastructure |
DAY 2 – Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Location: Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Neues Institutgebäude (NIG), 4th Floor, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna.
| 09:00 – 10:40 | 5.1: Dwelling, Housing, and Place Abandonment | 5.2: Beyond Disposal: Governance, Labor, and Environment | 5.3: Practicing Mobility, Rethinking Power |
| 10:40 – 11:10 | Coffee break | — | — |
| 11:10 – 12:50 | 6.1: Form and Space of Infrastructure | 6.2: Tracing Hydrosocialities: Between Nature, Politics, and Technology | 6.3: Tracing Power, Adapting Loss |
| 12:50 – 14:20 | Lunch break | — | — |
| 14:20 – 16:00 | 7.1: Ruins and Infrastructural Life Cycles | 7.2: Scaling Infrastructures: From Emissions to Emotions (Part II) | 7.3: Building and Imagining Futures |
Session 1.1: Mediating Spaces, Shifting Digital Lives
September 23, 2025, from 09:00 to 10:40
- The slow death of state infrastructures: On the platformization of street-corner media (Rivka Ribak)
- Seeing ‘Digital’ in (Non?)Continuity with Offline Life: Theoretical Perspectives For Locating Computer-Based Structures in Ethnographic Practice (Marco Sassaro)
- Can digital technologies help to overcome the limitations in spatial design of urban spaces? (Paulina Dobroć)
- Telecommunications infrastructure shaping everyday life in the European Arctic (Mirva Salminen)
- An Ecology of Publicly-Funded Federated Social Media: Towards Safe Public Communication? (Mira Schienagel)
Session 1.2: More-than-Human Entanglements
September 23, 2025, from 09:00 to 10:40
- Fishy borders and sense-making with salmon: politics of pink salmon removal at Njauddâm and Deatnu rivers (Sunna Kokkonen)
- Forest-Water Coordination at Infrastructural Margins: The Making of “Wiener Wasser” as More-than-Human Infrastructural Work (Paul Katterl)
- From Svalbard to Ellesmere Island: A Journey of a Fox in Solitude (Rojda Tuğrul)
- Linear Infrastructures and their More-than-Human Ripple Effects (Zachary Caple & Pierre du Plessis)
- Geopolitics of (un)built environments: from infrastructural (de)territorialisation to the (de)territorialisation of infrastructure (Vesa Väätänen)
Session 1.3: Geopolitics and Political Ecology
September 23, 2025, from 09:00 to 10:40
- Facing geopolitical turmoil through planned or promised infrastructures: The case of Canada (Giuseppe Amatulli)
- Chipping away at the monolith: reframing the Valle di Lei cross-border dam (Stella De Luca & Isabella Traeger)
- Conjuring the effects of the unbuilt: the Pucallpa – Cruzeiro do Sul infrastructure project (Pilar Delpino Marimon)
- Forecasting at the End of the World: Polar Shipping and the Production of the Future (Jacob Bolton)
- Polar frontiers, polar orbits: The vertiginous rise of Arctic commercial spaceports (Mia Bennett)
Session 2.1: Ways of Knowing, Worlds of Being: Epistemologies and Ontologies in Dialogue
September 23, 2025, from 11:10 to 12:50
- Cosmologies in More-than-Human Research: Bridging STS and Amerindian Perspectivism to Inquire the Natures (That) Cultures Give Rise To (João Fernandez Pereira)
- Ice as an Epistemic Framework: Infrastructural Toxicity and the More-than-Human Turn (Annouchka Bayley, Delfina Fantini van Ditmar, and Jennifer Schooling)
- Ontological infrastructures of extractivism: Supporting (un-)‘sustainable’ commodities for Global Supply Chains (María Soledad Paz)
- Geoengineering in Iceland: Infrastructural Ontology and Moving Beyond the “Natural/Artificial” Divide (Cody Skahan)
- The Apocalyptic Blaze: Reckoning with Fire, Destruction, and Unsettled Futures (Cecilia Vasquez & Aaron Gregory)
Session 2.2: Infrastructuring Energy Transitions
September 23, 2025, from 11:10 to 12:50
- ‘Pending’: Navigating renewable energy, futures, and ‘not-yet-built’ wind farms in the Faroe Islands (Róisín Kennelly)
- Between Development and the Green Transition: Towards Sustainable Arctic Infrastructure? (Olga Povoroznyuk)
- The ‘not yet’ of a post-Arctic peninsula (Janike Kampevold Larsen)
- Agricultural Infrastructure and the Transition to Renewable Energy in a Desert Farming Community (Liron Shani)
- You have bats in your ‘spouw’ – Repurposing the Dutch housing infrastructure for the energy transition by constructing with bats (Lucas Brunet)
Session 2.3: Scaling Infrastructures: From Emissions to Emotions (Part I)
September 23, 2025, from 11:10 to 12:50
- Adverse incidents and management in northern areas: Case studies from the Norwegian-Barents Sea Region (Erik Henriksen)
- An oasis in the desert. Khorgos: Infrastructure without completeness, environment without borders (Francesco Carota, Sofia Leoni & Michele Bonino)
- Mapping and weighing global terrestrial infrastructures: implications for resource demand (Helmut Haberl, André Baumgart, Jan Streeck, Fridolin Krausmann & Dominik Wiedenhofer)
- Green Infrastructure for Blue Economies: Risk, Matters of Care, and the State (W. Alex Webb, E. Christian Wells, Rebecca Zarger & Maya Trotz)
- In the Land of the Giants: Weird Infrastructure in Canada’s Oil Sands (Clinton Westman)
Session 3.1: Adapting in Urban and Rural Environments
September 23, 2025, from 14:20 to 16:00
- Heat in the Air: The Role of “Colourless” Infrastructure in Exposure and Adaptation to Urban Heat (Franciszek Chwałczyk)
- Re-imagining Infrastructures: Planning Sustainable Futures for Peripheral Towns (Kasper Albrektsen & Anne Mette Boye)
- Urban nature as critical infrastructure: examples from Finland (Hannah Strauss-Mazzullo)
- Unsettled at Sea: Offshore Renewable Energy and the Social Life of Infrastructural Experimentation (Marianna Betti)
- The Gift of the Abandoned Frontier: Fireweed and the Rhythms of Recolonization (Rusana Novikova)
Session 3.2: Mining and Infrastructure, or The Built Environment of Extractivism
September 23, 2025, from 14:20 to 16:00
- (Un)built Arctic Deep Sea: Imagining Mineral Extraction (Marta Gentilucci)
- Cryospheric Challenges: A Comparative Look at Arctic and Alpine Infrastructural Environments (Peter Schweitzer)
- Thinking infrastructurally about mining practices in Shukruti (Marije Nieuwland)
- (Un)Gardening: Reframing Mining Landscapes and Infrastructures (Anna-Lena Müller)
- Dis-continuing coal mining infrastructures with more-than-human mobilities (Eva Kotašková)
Session 3.3: Politics of Dis-connection
September 23, 2025, from 14:20 to 16:00
- “Unpaved Arteries”: The Social Consequences of Roads in Nome, Alaska (Alex Griffin)
- Phantom Infrastructure? Environment, Politics and Futures of Unfinished Bay Bridge in Taiwanese Contested Archipelagic Borderlands of Kinmen (Chengyu Yang)
- The Broken Promise of Connection: Solitary Road and the Unfinished Infrastructures of the Anthropocene (Tarja Salmela)
- (Un)built roads and waterways in the Alps: economic interests and demanding materiality (Margareth Lanzinger)
- Transborder Roads and Mobility Control: The Borderwork of Infrastructure across the Eastern Indo-Nepal Border (Mélanie Vandenhelsken)
Session 4.1: Cultural and Food Practices Across (Un-)built Landscapes
September 23, 2025, from 16:30 to 18:10
- A field can be a wall (Lucas Rinzema & Jim van der Steege)
- Biodiversity by Design: Experimenting with Agricultural Infrastructures (Pieter Lagerwaard)
- Fish, Feathers, and the Limits of the Law: The Rampart Dam Controversy and U.S.-Canada Industrial Politics in an Age of Transition, ca. 1950-1965 (Andreas Mentrup-Womelsdorf)
- Patchy Deliveries and Seasonal Foodscapes: Provisioning of the Chukotkan Regional Hub, Russian Arctic (Elena Davydova)
- Dynamics of Built and Unbuilt Infrastructure through Cultural Extensions (Michael D. Fischer & Sally A. Applin)
Session 4.2: Infrastructuring Climate Futures
September 23, 2025, from 16:30 to 18:10
- Biomass Energy, Work and Nature Restoration: The Forest as an Infrastructure to Reshape the Landscape in Times of Climatic Emergence. The Case of Vall de Lord (Paolo Macrì Antkiewicz)
- Future-oriented imaginaries of island life, environment, and infrastructure in Finland (Erika Takahashi & Kirsi Sonck-Rautio)
- Infrastructures of Risk Management (Felix Ansmann)
- Planning for Doomsday: The Ike Dike that Isn’t Yet (Nataya Friedan)
Session 4.3: Affective and Sentient Infrastructure
September 23, 2025, from 16:30 to 18:10
- Listening as Intangible Infrastructure: Countering Over-generational Amnesia in Arctic Environments (Kimmo Hokkanen)
- “For the Love of Nabucco!”: Affective Excess for an Unbuilt Fossil Gas Pipeline Project (Bilge Firat)
- ‘I Hear the Sea’: Local Lived Experiences of Disaster Mitigation Infrastructure in Northeast Tōhoku (Jesse Bia)
- Speculative Connectivities: Caring for the Future across the Strait of Messina (Sabrina Stallone)
- Walking-with cracks: un-making infrastructures for imagining otherwise (Kate Monson)
Session 5.1: Dwelling, Housing, and Place Abandonment
September 24, 2025, from 09:00 to 10:40
- Detachedwhere: Inhabiting Finnish Wilderness Cabins to Reimagine Infrastructures (Mari-Sohvi Miettinen)
- Abandoned places considered from a Heideggerian framework (Diana Paula Fuhr)
- Unbecoming beasts: The agency of unbuilt infrastructures across time and space (Beril Ocaklı, Gretchen Bakke & Timothy Moss)
- (Un)building Sanitary Infrastructures: Composting Toilets for Living in a Damaged World (Natalia Picaroni Sobrado)
- Urban infrastructure, the housing right, and everyday life in Brazilian favelas (Isabelle Chagas)
Session 5.2: Beyond Disposal: Governance, Labor, and Environment
September 24, 2025, from 09:00 to 10:40
- Unbuilt Futures, Paper Realities: Waste infrastructure and bureaucratic aspirations in a small Indian city (Aishwarya Mukhopadhyay)
- Women Informal Waste Collectors’ Adaptation Experience to Jatibarang Landfill Infrastructure (Alberta Prabarini, Nabilah Rifdha Elmira & Reza Arlianda)
- Backwater Urbanism: Amphibious infrastructures and the politics of opacity in Kochi, India (Matt Barlow)
- Technopolitics of Infrastructure Transitions: Managing Water and Waste in Southern Belize (E. Christian Wells & W. Alex Webb)
- Unbuilt Landfills: Social and Geographical Influences on Waste Management in Remote Alaskan Villages (Kaori Ishii, Go Iwahana & Kumiko Nakano)
Session 5.3: Practicing Mobility, Rethinking Power
September 24, 2025, from 09:00 to 10:40
- Infrastructural Sovereignty and the Social Life of Transport: Ethnographic Insights from Northern Manitoba, Canada (Philipp Budka)
- Moving around the north: Migration in Greenland and the Faroe Islands (Timothy Heleniak)
- Thinking Infrastructure: Local Perspectives on the Fehmarnbelt Tunnel (Ute Hablesreiter)
- Unexceptional Infrastructures and the Changing Intimacies of Travel in the Arctic (Sophie Elixhauser & Susan Vanek)
- Walking against the grain of infrastructure: Gender and infrastructural subversion in Karachi (Aseela Haque)
Session 6.1: Form and Space of Infrastructure
September 24, 2025, from 11:10 to 12:50
- When Infrastructure Becomes Architecture: Crisis, Cosmopolitics and Latent Forms (María Páez González & Brendon Carlin)
- ‘Defence Before Beauty’? Infrastructure and the operational landscape of Fylingdales early warning station (Richard Brook & Luca Csepley-Knorr)
- Cracks in the Glass Wall. From Connection to Collision with the More-Than-Human World (Noemi Quagliati)
- Vernacular architecture in the Anthropocene: Resilience, adaptation and abandonment in the Himalayas (Hubert Feiglstorfer & Calum Blaikie)
- Indigenous architecture in South Asia (India) and the blend of cultural with the spatial (Subhadra Mitra Channa)
Session 6.2: Tracing Hydrosocialities: Between Nature, Politics, and Technology
September 24, 2025, from 11:10 to 12:50
- From Reservoir to Farm: A story of human(e) infrastructures (Francesca Romana Dell’Aglio)
- Infrastructural Landscapes: Everyday Life, Maintenance, and Water Supply Management (Anna Lehr Mueser)
- Making Watershed Worlds: Environmental Infrastructure and Watershed-based Management in Cleveland, Ohio (Magnus Olav Nyaas Ravnå)
- ‘Amorphous’ infrastructure and ‘slow’ resistance to long-proposed hydropower dams and water diversions in Southeast Asia’s Salween River Basin (Zali Fung)
Session 6.3: Tracing Power, Adapting Loss
September 24, 2025, from 11:10 to 12:50
- Future Audition: in the Offing (Julian Weaver)
- Landscape of Atomic Optimism (Peter Williams)
- The Materiality of Deletion and Infrastructural Flow: Assemblages of Nucleic Acid Testing Booths in Post-Pandemic China (Xu Li & Yuan Yuan)
- Fort Churchill: Social Adaptation to Military Infrastructure and its Loss (Roland M. Sawatzky & Matthew S. Wiseman)
Session 7.1: Ruins and Infrastructural Life Cycles
September 24, 2025, from 14:20 to 16:00
- From Fish Nets to Feedback Loops: Circular Transitions and the Temporal Dimensions of Infrastructure in Norwegian Aquaculture (Rasa Zuzeviciute)
- From gravel pits to wetlands: biodiversity refuges on infrastructural ruins (Ander Achotegui-Castells & Maria Coma-Santasusana)
- From Polluters to Climate Solutionists: Leveraging Teesside’s Industrial Heritage for a Green Industrial Transition (Jay Sinclair)
- Opportunity’s aftermath (Evelina Gambino)
- Ruderal Futures: Scrap Metal, Infrastructural Decay, and Precarious Ecologies in Post-Soviet Georgia (Esma Berikishvili)
Session 7.2: Scaling Infrastructures: From Emissions to Emotions (Part II)
September 24, 2025, from 14:20 to 16:00
- Migrant and Tourist Infrastructures on Land and at Sea: Nature Tourism in the North of Iceland (Magda Kopańska)
- A critical reframing of extrastatecraft infrastructuralisation in the Strait of Sicily (Isabella Traeger)
- Bubbles of the Earth. Place, Accident and the Counter-plan in Bangkok (Andrew Johnson & Daena Funahashi)
- Chemical Infrastructures of the Anthropocene (Lenka Veselá)
Session 7.3: Building and Imagining Futures
September 24, 2025, from 14:20 to 16:00
- The Panama Canal as speculative ‘green infrastructure’: calculating carbon-negative futures (Áron Rossman-Kiss)
- Futurity and aspiration: imaginations of crisis response and future directions for humanitarian engagement in fiction and art (Bram J. Jansen)
- From global trends to local realities: A multi-scale scenario-building methodology for community infrastructure planning (Nikita Strelkovskii, et al.)
- Imagining (and Imaging) the Planet: Earth Observation Infrastructures and Anthropological Opportunities (Michael Anranter)
- Infrastructuring the Good Life in Divtasvuodna/Tysfjord, Northern Norway (Èva Cossette-Laneville)