Workshop 'Growth Infrastructures'

How has economic growth become so entangled in human activities? This workshop explores how the quest for continuous growth and alternative attempts to instigate “post-growth” or “degrowth” are each embedded in overlapping socio-material relations that facilitate core societal functions, including sustainable development.

Participants in this workshop will collectively develop and apply the concept of ‘growth infrastructures’ to understand how economic and social relations oriented towards growth might be converted into post-growth infrastructures, as well as how attempts to instigate post-growth infrastructures can inadvertently re-embed growth.

This workshop (1) situates (post-)growth amongst the various ‘infrastructural turns’ mushrooming across the social sciences and humanities in recent decades; (2) empirically investigates infrastructural relations of (post-)growth across time and space; and (3) illuminates the possibilities and limits of transformations required to tackle today’s rapidly unfolding and intersecting socio-ecological crises. The research papers presented and discussed in this workshop are working drafts that will subsequently be revised in preparation of a special issue of the journal Economy & Society who along with the Rudolf Agricola School for Sustainable Development are co-sponsoring this event.

Programme and registration