Operationalizing Energy Justice: Social Sciences and Quantitative Modeling
In a nutshell
Emmanuelle Santoire is taking part in the workshop entitled “Operationalising Energy Justice: Social Sciences and Quantitative Modelling”.
Description
This session proposes an interdisciplinary exploration of energy justice through the combined lenses of social sciences and quantitative modeling. It brings together expertise from energy system modeling and planning, energy geography, decision-support modeling, and the analysis of underground resource use, availability, and associated industrial developments. The session addresses a central challenge of contemporary energy transitions: translating the normative concept of energy justice into operational tools that inform energy planning and resource allocation. Designed as an interactive and participatory workshop, the session will engage participants in real-time modeling exercises, allowing them to explore how different justice-oriented constraints affect energy system outcomes and material requirements. By directly interacting with simplified planning models and resource-use frameworks, we will collectively examine trade-offs between technological choices, resource constraints, and equity considerations. A core objective of the session is to gather feedback from the audience in order to foster a collective reflection on how energy justice can be defined, interpreted, and operationalized through the lens of energy planning and resource use, thereby contributing to more transparent, inclusive, and just decision-making processes.
Undisciplined Life: When Technological Infrastructures Lose Control
In a nutshell
Olivier Coutard is taking part in the thematic session entitled “Undisciplined Life: When Technological Infrastructures Lose Control”.
Description
Over the last two centuries, and particularly since the mid-twentieth century, the development of large infrastructure systems has deeply affected ecosystems (and biogeochemical cycles) on a planetary scale, according to highly uneven geographies of opportunity and exposure. In the recent period, infrastructures have become increasingly associated with living organisms, ecosystems, and more broadly with ecology, as reflected in the development of “green infrastructure”, the infrastructuring of living systems in so-called nature-based solutions, the growing pervasiveness of infrastructure-based environments – not to mention the increasingly-present reality of infrastructure spaces (ducts, galleries, facilities…) as living environments. However, an unavoidable tension exists between infrastructure projects for living environments and ecological dynamics;the former rely on a reductionist approach that seek to standardize and control ecosystems, while the latter operate through nonlinear, adaptive, and often unpredictable dynamics. This tension almost necessarily results in various forms of disruption to the script assigned to living organisms within these infrastructure projects. It also entails social consequences, through infrastructure failures and environmental crises that tend to amplify existing inequalities.This session will question these unescapable tension(s) between infrastructural developments and the dynamics of ecosystems in different social context, as well as the inequalities resulting from these tensions.