Call for papers: Towards post-growth infrastructure

Rethinking the material and cultural conditions of prosperity

CALL FOR PAPERS

Deadline for abstracts: 15 December 2025

Post-growth champions an economic system focused on human wellbeing, ecological regeneration and the fulfilment of essential needs in response to the current socio-ecological polycrisis. Post-growth therefore challenges received ideas about the basic underpinnings of society, both in terms of essential services provisioning, such as water, housing, internet and food, as well as shared ideals about individual fulfilment, progress, happiness and material success. Postgrowth, in other words, requires radically different infrastructures for socio-ecological prosperity.

Post-growth scholarship, however, has viewed infrastructures mainly as small-scale initiatives, while their more complex role as lever of and condition for transformation has received only limited attention. The symposium will address this challenge: A post-growth agenda implies deconstructing and reconfiguring current infrastructural arrangements that support the patterns of production and consumption upon which fossil capital depends. This includes traditionally understood infrastructure such as transport, water and energy, but also underlying ideologies or societal aspirations, e.g. homeownership, career progression and consumerism as happiness.

The symposium aims to create a dialogue around the features and processes of post-growth infrastructure: We call for conceptual and empirical contributions that explore how infrastructure – large and small, formal and informal, technological and cultural – can help bring about post-growth transformations. We welcome especially work that engages with the ‘infrastructural turn’ in STS, geography, planning, cultural studies and anthropology.

We are interested in papers addressing dimensions such as:

Defining and conceptualising post-growth infrastructure

What distinguishes post-growth infrastructures from growth infrastructures?

Infrastructure’s inner workings

Through which logics do infrastructures operate? How can infrastructure’s particularities be harnessed for transformations towards post-growth?

Emergence and durability of post-growth infrastructures

How do post-growth infrastructures emerge in specific contexts? How do they endure and evolve over time?

Designing infrastructure

Which values, imaginaries and affects (hopes, dreams, fears) are scripted into post-growth infrastructures?

Strategies for infrastructural transformation

Through which means can growth infrastructures be reworked, appropriated or reused for post-growth purposes? When is it more appropriate to rework an existing infrastructure or to deconstruct it?