Energy as social relation: Refugees' energy commons for infrastructuring beyond the grid

This paper reconceptualizes energy as a social relation of (re)production, focusing on the overlooked intersection of refugees, housing precarity, and energy practices. Drawing upon ethnographies with refugees living in squatted houses in Thessaloniki, Greece, we introduce the concept of refugees' energy commons , to explain how refugees' communities self-organize to meet their energy needs -repairing, maintaining, and improvising energy infrastructures to provide heating, cooling, insulation, cooking, and communication. These collective energy infrastructuring practices which act as means to reclaim disrupted life trajectories, question the dominant discourses around energy poverty revealing that access to energy is not simply a matter of technical adaptation or ability to pay bills; rather, it is a matter of being embedded into a set of social relations of (re)production, within which communities, institutions, and technologies, enable or disable access to the housing-energy nexus.