Mobilities are woven into ‘the plot of the global climate crisis’, and people’s movements are among ‘the most topical and concerning symptoms of planetary transformations’ (Baldwin and Bettini 2017, 10). For this reason, mobility scholarship has produced robust literature discussing mobility in relation with the climate since its earliest period, for example when After the Car (Dennis and Urry 2009) was published. This literature has mainly focused on various but interconnected themes, such as mobility transitions or fossil fuel and energy transitions, climate migrants or refugees, Anthropocene or more-than-human mobilities, alternative mobilities or mobile (social) life, and mobility governance or politics. Recently, many journals have also organised special issues on topics such as ‘Anthropocene Mobilities’ (Mobilities, 2019), ‘Time and Mobility after the Anthropocene’ (Sustainability, 2020), ‘Shapes of Socio-ecologically Sustainable Mobility Regimes’ (Applied Mobilities, 2023), ‘Mobility Justice’ (Australian Geographer, 2023) and ‘Auto/biography, Mobilities and the Climate Emergency’ (Mobilities, 2024). These continuing publications demonstrate the enormous urgency and complexity of climate change today, as well as alluding to the potential topics requiring the attention of mobility scholarship to achieve ‘more just mobility futures’ (Sheller 2021). 

 

 Building on the theme of ‘mobility, infrastructure, and the humanities’ which was discussed at the 2022 GMHC, this conference invites scholars to discuss mobility infrastructures in relation to the climate. While mobility infrastructures often have critical impacts on exacerbating today’s climate change through their construction, maintenance, and operation, they are also ‘significantly exposed to the impacts of climate change’ which can lead to ‘widespread infrastructure failure and damages’ (OECD 2024). These impacts result in disproportionate social and environmental consequences based not only on geography but also on factors such as race, class, gender, and age, thus prompting us to attend to ‘climate mobility regimes’ which ‘frame, manage, and regulate the nexus between mobilities and climate change in a particular manner’ (Boas et al. 2022, 3371). 

 

 Some of emergent trends in recent times related to the above themes include the competitive development of electric vehicles (sometimes across geopolitical spaces) and the formation of ride-sharing economies. These technological innovations often intersect with deeply troubling Big Tech capitalism and monopolies, both pushing away alternate models of transportation (such as cycling) and doing missionary work for automobility all over again (Liu, 2022). At the same time, the ‘growing importance of datafication and algorithmic culture across diverse (im)mobilities’ shows that ‘hybrid physical and data mobilities’ and data driven mobility infrastructures are becoming increasingly important in addressing climate change (Behrendt and Sheller 2023). Urban Digital Twins (UDTs), for instance, are considered to foster innovation in tackling complex urban challenges, including the climate emergency, by facilitating data-driven decision-making for urban operators (Zhu and Jin 2025). Yet, these technological promises can take on a spectacular dimension, where the promise of technological salvation through smart and green technologies masks and perpetuates ongoing extractive or exclusionary practices. 

 

 The conference significantly encourages scholars ‘to intervene epistemologically and politically in an ontology of infrastructure for its transformation, occasionally mobilising creativity and imagination’ (Adey et al. 2024) to create more just mobility futures. That is, this conference is committed to ‘imagining other forms of social life’, what Amitav Ghosh (2016) refers to as ‘the challenge posed by the climate crisis’. This will be achieved more effectively through cross-disciplinary discussions about climate, mobility, and infrastructure, that traverse multiple scales of humans, nonhumans, and more-than-humans, and that attend both physical and hybrid mobility infrastructures and envisioned, speculated, or sensed mobility infrastructures, embedded in literary, cultural, visual, and creative endeavours and works. 

 

 This conference invites proposals from different disciplines within climate, 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, science technology studies, AI and data research, tourism, transportation, education, Black and Indigenous studies, gender and sexuality studies, and others. It will present an opportunity for scholars to share their ideas and inquiries at the intersection of climate, mobility infrastructure, and the humanities, transcending the conventional divide between the social sciences and humanities and the arts.