Repairing social connections: Dismantling carbon infrastructures with care

Abstract

In this final commentary to close the forum, I engage with the responses to Repair and care: Locating the work of climate crisis. These rich analyses provide a basis from which to reflect on three developments since writing the first article: cascading disasters caused by intense weather events; a change of government that has shifted Australia's political relationship with climate change; and a year of fieldwork with metallurgical coal miners in a rapidly transforming energy landscape. Together, the responses offer a nuanced approach to the work of climate change that is more attentive to power and politics, diverse skills and knowledges, and the structures and systems that continue to marginalise those who are tasked with repair and care.

Doing the work: Locating labour in infrastructural geography

“…We see great potential for scholarly attention to infrastructural labour to engage with parallel discussions surrounding repair and care labours in service of, and resulting from, climate crisis and emerging transitions (cf. Carr, 2022; Carr, 2023, and accompanying dialogues). How might the lens of infrastructural labour contribute to recognising labours’ skills, capacities, and knowledge, recognising spatial, subjective, and scalar differences, while also weighing up calls for deepened understandings of complexity with the urgent need for rapid transition amidst climate crisis (Stein, 2022: 4)?…”