Beyond plug-and-play: how a piece of writing found its shape

Something I wrote for an assessment in my MA programme has just been published on the SOAS blog, and I wanted to share a little of how it came to exist, because pieces of writing rarely arrive fully formed.

The essay — Beyond plug-and-play: Sustainability as a relational practice — began with a connection I didn't expect to make. I was reading Hannah Appel's ethnography of offshore oil rigs for my module on the Anthropology of Sustainability and found myself recognising the logic of my RAF deployments in it: modular infrastructure designed to be replicated and moved, self-contained worlds where places and people were reduced to acronyms and callsigns. I didn't see it at the time. It just felt like the way things were.

That recognition — that the same disconnection logic structures both military operations and so many 'green' solutions — became the spine of the piece. It let me ask a question I'd been circling for a while: if we swap petrol vehicles for electric ones without changing how we relate to place, people, and the more-than-human world, are we really doing anything differently?

Writing it meant sitting with some uncomfortable truths from my own past, alongside thinkers like Vandana Shiva, Zoe Todd, and Sophie Chao, whose work helped me articulate what I was fumbling towards: that regenerative futures aren't scalable solutions, they're thousands of situated, place-specific, relational ones.

I'm proud of this piece. It feels like the beginning of something I want to keep thinking and writing about.

You can read it in full here: https://www.soas.ac.uk/about/blogs/beyond-plug-and-play-sustainability-relational-practice