Special Session Call for Papers: Ports and Pipes, Futures and Fragments

Regional Studies Association Annual Conference

Gothenburg, Sweden

June 15-18, 2026

Organizers

Jen Nelles (Oxford Brookes University)

Michael Glass (University of Pittsburgh)

Jean-Paul Addie (Georgia State University)

We are extending this expression of interest to infrastructural and regional scholars examining the planning, governance, and maintenance of pipelines and ports as part of the RSA Network on Infrastructural Regionalism (NOIR).

Regions are shaped by a wide variety of infrastructures that marshal the movement and management of goods, commodities, energy, and waste. These connective systems – literal and figurative pipelines – regularly bridge the spaces between where value is extracted and where it is consumed, bypassing but profoundly influencing communities along the way. Ports, by contrast, serve as vital placed infrastructures that both facilitate and regulate the movement of goods, people, and capital, simultaneously integrating local economies into transnational networks while reinforcing barriers (physical, regulatory, and socio-technical) that define territorial boundaries. Through pipes and ports, places can be abruptly linked, or truncated, by networks and forces across incredible distances. Regional spaces and regional futures are defined in relation, or response, to such infrastructures.

We are interested in examining how key stakeholders and communities within regional envelopes leverage the presence of infrastructural pipelines and ports (as with labor markets, for example) and pursue infrastructural-based investments to release desired regional futures. We are also concerned with understanding what occurs to regions defined by infrastructural pipelines and flows but are removed from their material benefits, as well as port cities and regions that are ‘left behind’ by the locations of high-value transformation of commodities, and those that are marginalized by their conscious opposition to the transformations that infrastructure can compel.

For this special session, we invite papers exploring different types of infrastructure and

infrastructural regions, including:

Ports, marine freight infrastructure, and shipping routes

Blue highways: intercoastal and river freight transport networks

Inland ports and logistics nodes

Freight rail and intermodal terminals

Planning and protesting pipelines

Dams and reservoirs 

Energy generation and transmission networks

Carbon capture and storage and other environmental remediation 

Remote infrastructure for extractive industries

Wastewater and sewage

By exploring these infrastructural regionalisms engendered by such systems, we hope to encourage the interrogation of infrastructural and regional dynamics in peripheral as well as metropolitan regions while opening the conversation to different problematiques and varieties of governance. Centering questions of transport, transmission, and treatment also broadens our focus to include and account for private infrastructure and its influence on regional spaces. As such, we are inviting contributions that engage with ‘ports and pipes’ to unpack the key themes animating the NOIR network: interdisciplinary dialogues, cross-border governance, seeing like a region, and infrastructure and regional lives.

Please send 250-word abstracts to infrastructural.regionalism@gmail.com by 1 February 2026. Include the title of your paper, the names and affiliations of all authors, and contact information for the corresponding author.