Call for papers KCE Conference: A non-carbon future?
Knowledge/Culture/Ecologies International Conference
A non-carbon future? Interrogating the political and ontological implications of the low-carbon transition (Panel 27)
November 15-18, 2017 – Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago – Chile.
Abstract
Faced with the challenges of climate change and its dependency on a carbon-based capitalism, there has been increasing scholarly and policy attention payed to designing and/or implementing technologies that can successfully materialize low-carbon transitions. These “low carbon” sociotechnical arrangements might take different forms ranging from the development and implementation of new (hard) technologies for energy generation and distribution at a domestic, local and/or national scale (such as renewables and storage systems); the emergence of new discourses and policies focused on implementing alternative types of economic arrangements (Shared Economy, Circular Economy, degrowth); and/or the deployment of new ways of organizing and producing sustainable technical innovation based on tinkering, experimentation and citizens’ spaces and devices (DIY, makers, Blockchain)
This panel seeks to discuss about the political and ontological implications of emergent, bottom-up and distributive low-carbon sociotechnical arrangements which seek to disrupt dominant ways of organization of carbon-based economic systems
More concretely, we are interested in presentations that address either empirically or theoretically:
– The type of social and environmental worlds that these socio-technical arrangements contribute to enact and circulate. This concerns questions such as: How are publics and politics enacted by these technologies? How do these new low-carbon technologies problematize existing dichotomies such as producers/consumers, experts/non-experts, etc.?
– How and whether these types of sociotechnical arrangements have some “revolutionary” potential in terms of opening new ways of organizing social and economic life. This concerns questions such as: What types of futures are they contributing to enact? What forms of experimentation of possible worlds do these new technologies allow? Which forms of engagement and material involvement with environmental issues do these technologies make possible (Marres 2012)?
Convenors
Tomas Ariztía tariztia@gmail.com, NUMIES, Universidad Diego Portales,
Carla Alvial carla.alvial@gmail.com NUMIES, Universidad Diego Portales
The call for papers and media work closes 26 May, 2017. For further details, please contact us at tariztia@gmail.comorcarla.alvial@gmail.com Or submit directly via the online submission form.