The webinar series Beyond Green Capitalism. Critical Perspectives on Energy, Ecology and Green Transition is launching, curated by Critical Lab, a group bringing together researchers from CNR-IRPPS, Queen Mary University of London, Sapienza University of Rome, and Roma Tre University working on issues related to a just energy transition.

Starting on 23 October and running through June 2027, the online series will feature monthly meetings addressing three main themes: the material geographies of the energy transition; issues of power, justice, and violence; and transformative change and the energy transition.

Far from being inherently sustainable or equitable, renewable energy infrastructures reproduce and, in some cases, intensify patterns of land dispossession, environmental degradation, and social inequality. The webinars examine energy transitions as contested processes shaped by power, capital, and social struggles. Rather than focusing exclusively on technological solutions, it explores the political economies and ecologies of energy across diverse geographical and social contexts around the world: from renewable energy installations to mineral extraction sites, from manufacturing facilities to spaces devoted to waste management and disposal, and from areas affected by conflicts over resource control to spaces of resistance and collective efforts to organize alternatives.

The first session will take place on 23 October 2026, from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. UK time (4:00–5:00 p.m. Italian time), and will focus on Crude Capitalism and Myths of a Green Transition, convened by Professor Adam Hanieh.

Critical Lab is coordinated by Carlo Inverardi Ferri, principal investigator of the ERC project Illicit Labour and the Photovoltaic Industry, hosted by CNR-IRPPS. Contributors include Anwesha Aditi, Julian Lovreglio, and Riccardo Martinelli (CNR-IRPPS and Sapienza University of Rome).

Updates on the seminar series and Critical Lab: https://critical-lab.org/

Issue 1/2026 of the journal Welfare e Ergonomia, “Welfare and Digital Technologies: Opportunities, Challenges and Innovations”, edited by Giuseppe Luca De Luca Picione, Gabriella Punziano, and Domenico Trezza, has been published.

The issue examines the relationship between society, the transformation of social policies, and digital technologies from different perspectives, viewing the latter as a key driver and context of social change.

Even before facilitating accessibility or making a service faster, digitization intervenes in the ways in which needs are recorded, measured, compared, and transformed into data, while also defining how these needs are viewed and examined by the institutions that determine whether, how, and to what extent to respond to them.

Three strands run through this issue:

• digital technologies as knowledge infrastructure, in relation to the risks and opportunities involved in governing public knowledge and to open science;
• digital technologies in care and healthcare, considering how they interact with professional relationships, territorial asymmetries, and organizational responsibilities;
• professional practices, forms of mediation, and sociotechnical risks accompanying the digitalization of welfare.

Taken together, these contributions offer a non-univocal picture of digital welfare. They highlight its possibilities, but also its frictions; its capacity to generate new forms of knowledge, but also the risk of producing opacity; the promise of supporting services and professions, but also the possibility of separating technical infrastructure from the social contexts in which it is supposed to operate. It is in this ambivalence, rather than in an abstract opposition between innovation and risk, that the meaning of this special issue lies.