Infrastructural Being

Jarno Valkonen is a professor of Sociology at the University of Lapland, Finland. His wide-ranging research interests include politics of nature, human-environment relationality, and indigenous knowledge. Recently, his research has focused on waste governance, Circular Economy, and infrastructures. Veera Kinnunen (Ph.D.) is a sociologist and a cultural historian at the University of Oulu. She is working on a threshold of more-than-human sociology, environmental humanities, and feminist ethics. Her research interests cover material culture of everyday life, dwelling, and waste. Heikki Huilaja (Ph.D.) is a researcher in sociology at the University of Lapland. His main research interests cover work and labor market, with a particular emphasis on recruitment and evolution of skills. In the area of waste studies, Huilaja’s focus is on waste as a source of employment and business opportunities and on the societal organization of waste in Finnish Lapland. Teemu Loikkanen (MSocSc) is a junior researcher at the University of Lapland. In his ongoing doctoral research, he explores the position of citizens in Circular Economy waste management by developing the concept of waste citizenship.

• Introduction: Naturecultural imagination in the times of environmental damage.- Approaching infrastructural being.- Anticipatory Infrastructures, Emerging Technologies and Visions of Energy Futures.- Assembling Wild Nature: Icelandic Wildness as a Natureculture Meshwork.- The Social Class and Lifestyle Embeddedness of Being Within Energy Infrastructures.- Circular economy as infrastructural change – waste citizenship in the bin.- Everyday infrastructures of care: unmaking waste through repairing and composting.- The Biosphere and the Garden: Nature as Infrastructure?.- Afterword: Some unintentional consequences of infrastructure.