Call for Abstracts: “Theorising Industrial Decarbonisation: Ethics, Entanglements, and Emerging Futures" @ Energy Ethics 2026
Timothy Neale
Please submit abstracts to kari.d...@monash.edu
Abstracts due by 1 November 2025
Abstracts should be approximately 500 words
Please include your name, affiliation and contact details
And whether you plan to attend in person or present virtually
Further information: Energy Ethics 2026: Infrastructures of Energy Conference https://energyethics.st-andrews.ac.uk/ee2026/
4-6 Aug, 2026 University of St. Andrews (hybrid panel)
Panel Title: Theorising Industrial Decarbonisation: Ethics, Entanglements, and Emerging Futures
Panel Convenors:
Kari Dahlgren: kari.d...@monash.edu
(Monash University)
Timothy Neale: t.n...@deakin.edu.au
(Deakin University)
Abstract: Industrial decarbonisation and its energy base represent a critical, yet under-theorised, dimension of the global response to climate change. As heavy industries like cement, steel, fertilisers, fossil fuels, and others, are reimagined as sites of low-carbon innovation, new ethical and political questions arise through the convergence of diverse domains, such as energy systems, labour relations, financial and policy instruments, supply chains and much more. While the imperative to decarbonise such industries is strong, most projects being pursued rely on technocratic, developmentalist, and capital-intensive logics that reproduce existing inequalities, social and environmental harms. This raises critical questions about what kinds of futures are being imagined into being, for whom, and at what cost.
This panel asks how social scientists can meaningfully engage with the ethical and political stakes of industrial decarbonisation. To do so, we must understand this transformation not as a single, socio-technical challenge, but as a convergence of multiple domains including energy, extraction, infrastructure, labour, finance, carbon governance, environmental policy, and Indigenous struggle, each with its own knowledge systems, histories, and power dynamics. These domains are increasingly drawn together under the umbrella of industrial decarbonisation, creating new assemblages often yet to be named or studied. Critically engaging with these convergences requires dialogue across disciplines and traditional areas of sub-disciplinary expertise. This panel asks how social scientists can meaningfully engage with the ethical stakes of industrial decarbonisation by bringing together scholars and scholarship to theorise the complex convergence of these shifting domains.
Together, we hope to explore questions such as:
How do the ethical imperatives of decarbonisation take shape within industrial contexts shaped by long histories of extraction, labour and Indigenous struggle, and environmental harm?
In what ways are new coalitions of expertise shaping the moral and political contours of industrial decarbonisation?
How are certain industrial futures made desirable or apparently inevitable, and what ethical assumptions underpin these visions of low-carbon industrial development?
Whose knowledge systems and ethical frameworks are centred or excluded in the governance of industrial transitions?
By drawing on and expanding the framework offered by energy ethics, this panel aims to build a dedicated subfield of the social science of industrial decarbonisation, which centres the ethical entanglements in the reconfiguring of industrial life in the climate crisis. Therefore, we seek papers which are grounded, situated and reflexive accounts of how ethical imperatives are mobilised, negotiated and contested in the name of industrial decarbonisation. This panel will also serve as a foundation for future collaborations, including a co-authored publication, in order to develop new conceptual and empirical insights into this multifaceted transition.