EXTENDED DEADLINE | Cfc: 2022 RSA Special Sessions on Infrastructural Materialities: Human and Non-Human Interactions

The 2022 RSA Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) conference from 14th to 17th September 2022 in Leipzig is open for your contributions until 30th May. Herewith we invite you to join one of the EEGA special sessions on infrastructure, hosted by Wladimir Sgibnev, Tonio Weicker and Lyubomir Pozharliev: “INFRASTRUCTURAL MATERIALITIES: HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN INTERACTIONS”

The session explores how CEE infrastructures affect, determine or co-produce human-non-human interactions and how those interactions are intertwined in the course of infrastructures’ conception, production, perception or operation. Non-human actants play a crucial, though underestimated role in making social sense of infrastructures. Looking into multiple processes of planning, policy-decision making as well as public contestation, we observe non-human actors as crucial vehicles shaping common perceptions of material environments.

Thus, we would like to assess how material artefacts move along infrastructures, and how the non-human entities construct experiences and perceptions. This includes the material ‘hardware’, such as roadways and vehicles, but also trajectories and flows, smells and sights, as well as other non-human actants such as animals, viruses, and smartphones. Contributions might include but are not limited to the mobility of material artefacts, contestations, networks, business models, or the connected modernisation paradigms and underlying normativities.

For more information and the instruction for the submission, visit https://www.regionalstudies.org/news/2022-rsa-cee-special-sessions.

This special session is Part of the EEGA series on infrastructure. Until 30th May 2022 academics, researchers, students and those working in policy and practice are invited to submit their papers. The conference will be held in cooperation with the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, the Research Centre Global Dynamics of the University of Leipzig and the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig. More information on the conference: https://www.regionalstudies.org/events/2022-rsa-cee-programme/

We are very looking forward to your abstracts and seeing you at the conference!