Rehearsing

From platforms for carbon removal to net zero proposals—infrastructure—is increasingly being positioned as essential for acting upon climate change by tech designers, governments, corporations and policy makers. However, communities transnationally are rehearsing their own proposals for—and contestations of—these infrastructural transformations. The rehearsing thread is indebted to abolitionist practices and its contributors focus on developing practices aimed at the uprooting of habits, operations and structures while interrogating the implications of their own activation (Maynard 2022). The thread focuses on researching the technical political scenes (and their design) that will inevitably emerge with climate change as it intensifies its hold on society, and on our economies. Such rehearsals take the form of grounded speculations, often involving digital media and practices that model modes of transformation through prototypes, toolkits, as well as workshops and events. Working together with organisers and translocal community groups, we generate actions and campaigns that focus on building alternatives through creating scenes to commune within and to collectively practice, learn and revise from. Through critical practice and collective action, we seek to understand how infrastructural oppression shapes lives—focusing on approaches to rehearse a different social order into being.