Philipp Degens, Iris Hilbrich & Sarah Lenz: Analyzing Infrastructures in the Anthropocene. [Abstract]

This contribution takes multiple ecological crises as the back-drop to connect discourses on sustainability and infrastructures. It shows how social science discourses on sustainability can profit from integrating an infrastructural perspective that considers material and immaterial components and their interdependencies with social practices and imaginations of the future. At the same time, ecological crises irritate conventional thinking about infrastructures by making the fragility and destructiveness of fossil infrastructures visible. An ecological perspective fundamentally challenges the view of infrastructure, as traditional concepts no longer manage to contribute to necessary planetary solutions. The contribution argues that struggles for the futures of sustainability are struggles for the modernization and transformation of, as well as control over and through (material, immaterial, planetary) infrastructures. The multiple crises show that infrastructures will and should receive special attention in the social sciences and humanities in the future.

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