Dates :
5th~6th December 2025

Innovations in mobility infrastructure, such as artificial intelligence databases, global logistics systems, climate technologies, satellite internet constellations and battery charging and swapping systems, carry uncertain, uneven and even cynical promises: augmenting human intelligence, facilitating freedoms beyond physical limits, establishing a sustainable environment on Earth, and moving, mediating, storing, calculating and coordinating life; at the same time, however, rending human thinking abilities be incompetent, disintegrating our societies, and putting all life on Earth, and even Earth itself, in catastrophic situations. Furthermore, the competition between nations for technological supremacy disseminates speculative imaginations and hopeful affects, which fuel infrastructure innovations. It is important to note that these impacts and side effects occur across multiple scales, from the local to the planetary. This therefore urges us to recognise and critically discuss infrastructure as an essential medium of human, non-human, and more-than-human activity, and, accordingly, as a vital object for addressing the just futures of our society and planet.

Not to mention John Urry’s focus on 'the significance of mobility infrastructures,’ which underpin almost all mobilities and enable ‘the socialities of everyday life’ (Urry 2007), infrastructures have long been of interest to mobility researchers (Adey et al. 2024). In recent years, there has been a considerable increase in infrastructure studies within the social sciences and humanities. This coincides with an expanded understanding of infrastructure as not only ‘a mundane conveyor of mobilities’, but also ‘an inspiring conveyor of fantasies, desires, and speculative futures’ (Sheller 2018). It is also noteworthy that mobilities can be triggered, propelled, delayed, or abandoned by imagination (Salazar 2018), aspirations (Lin et al. 2023), or affects (Boswoth 2023), often mediated by various forms of material or immaterial texts, as well as by habit (Bissell 2015), ethos, climate, weather and environmental or ecological habitats – especially for animals’ worlds. These can thus be addressed in terms of infrastructures.

‘More expansive notions of infrastructures’ engage with their symbolic and cultural values, social biases and exclusions, the normativity of their assumed use practice, and how infrastructural systems are ‘grounded’ (Pinnix et al. 2023). More significantly, they must also engage with their expressive and creative potential as they are encountered and lived (Adey et al. 2024), and as they are imagined and speculated. Recognising material and immaterial infrastructures across multiple scales, this conference seeks to address the ontology and ethos of mobility infrastructures for humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans. In doing so, it aims to enable the multifarious theoretical possibilities and creative potential of infrastructure studies, as nuanced by the humanities and social sciences, to emerge and to predict, challenge, and reconfigure our mobility presents and futures.

This conference invites proposals from different disciplines within mobility and infrastructures studies, including, but not limited to: literary and cultural studies, philosophy, history, art and design studies, anthropology, geography, media and communication, architecture, urban planning, climate and environmental studies, technology, tourism, transportation, education, Black and Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies, and others.