On September 27-28, Dialogues is going to be at NTNU Team Society Conference in Trondheim. Lucia Liste (NTNU Social Research- NSR) and Gisle Solbu co-organize the following panel as part of the conference program: “Transitions in tension: public engagement, social justice, and conflict in energy transitions”.

The panel invites contributions that help to shed light on the tensions of energy transitions and deal with one or several relevant aspects of the interplay between energy transitions and the societies in which they are inextricably rooted. Three areas are of particular interest:

• societal engagement and participation issues across different arenas of society (the publics’ different roles; the various ways in which the public engage beyond open-ended processes; etc.)
• social justice concerns (socially uneven impacts of energy transitions pathways, dynamics of inclusion/exclusion, procedural injustices, uneven distribution of the costs and benefits of different energy pathways, etc.)
• conflict (active resistance, emerging conflicts and the tensions between democratic governance and the actions deemed necessary for the implementation of energy technologies and policies, etc).

Conference theme: Beyond crises/ Beyond normal. A social science and humanities conference on sustainability

The conference will explore aspects of sustainability across everyday life, politics, technology, art, and innovation through a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary perspectives. The conference seeks to enable new academic conversations, strengthen ties between SSH communities, and increase the collective impact of SSH research, perspectives, and conversations on broader societal developments.

The conference aims to be an essential meeting place for SSH scholars broadly working under the umbrella of sustainability. The conference comes at a crucial juncture for contemporary societies. On the one hand, immediate crises and war color key debates. On the other hand, there is a need to re-think what new normals one might produce on the other side of these crises.The conference recognizes the need to move beyond mere technological solutionism, to fundamentally probe what it could mean to live in just and sustainable societies and how these can be achieved. This entails grappling with difficult questions such as how societies should be organised, why it is so difficult to break out of extractive fossil fueled capitalism, how to deal with and make sense of controversies and trade-offs, as well as probing what justice might entail.

The conference program will be available during the summer 2023 here