A multi-sited and transnational study of transitions towards post-fossil fuel societies

ended

Worlds of Lithium is a multi-sited and transnational study that examines how the strategic replacement of fossil fuels with electric transport powered by lithium-ion batteries is taking place in Chile, the largest lithium producer worldwide, China, the world leader in lithium-ion battery production, and Norway, likely to become the world’s first ‘zero emission’ electric vehicle country. The overall research questions of the project are: How do planetary strategies to decarbonize transport act upon the landscapes and societies where a) lithium is extracted, b) turned into technology and c) used and potentially reused and recycled? How can the different ways in which these strategies take place inform non-destructive approaches to collaborative responsible actions to phase out fossil fuels—or decrease their utilization? Worlds of Lithium will innovatively answer these questions through a transnational documentation of the knowledges and practices through which scientists, grassroots communities, policy makers, and lithium-ion battery producers are differently responding to ecological transformations and disruptions at stake in transitions to sustainable societies. The project will explore such knowledges and practices with a special focus on the effects strategies to respond to global warming have on existing socio-economic and eco-political planetary inequalities. By studying how planetary efforts for decarbonizing transport trigger different processes in resource-making, the project will not only enrich the anthropology of natural resources, but it will also create ground-breaking conceptual tools to support, think, and document emerging collaborations for sustainability capable of powering planetary eco-responsibility. Thus, the project will innovatively theorize new imaginaries to think about what counts as sustainable transitions in times of enhanced ecological sensitivity.