Leverhulme Lecture: Extracting the Energy Transition: Lithium Imaginaries and Impossible Futures
Professor Mark Goodale
The Centre for Rights and Anticolonial Justice & the Sussex Energy Group would like to invite everyone to join this Leverhulme Lecture on Wednesday 25 October at 3-4.30pm in the Arts C 175 Global Studies Resource Centre, or on Zoom (meeting room: 91459010498), to explore ethnographic research about the industrialisation of the world’s largest Lithium reserves in Bolivia.
Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor Mark Goodale will present the impacts of these developments on a multitude of communities and geopolitical alliances, and signals contradictions regarding mitigation of the climate crisis.
Abstract:
In this first of four Leverhulme Lectures during 2023-2024, Mark Goodale will introduce the main outlines of an ongoing book project that is based on four years of ethnographic research around Bolivia’s contested project to industrialize its lithium reserves, the world’s largest. Against a background of rapid transition away from fuel-burning vehicles and the production and adoption of electric vehicles, or EVs, the question of lithium supply has become increasingly pressing. The struggle to gain access to Bolivian lithium has consequences for a wide range of communities and geopolitical alliances, from the Indigenous and peasant villages near the sites of lithium production to the role of Chinese state technology and infrastructure companies in the development of new extractive processes at the Salar de Uyuni. This Lecture will examine the key questions of the broader project and signal the ways in which the ethnography of energy transition reveals a number of contradictions in the global strategy to mitigate the climate crisis.
Bio:
Mark Goodale is a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME) and a member (Academic Visitor) of St Antony’s College. He is also Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology and Director of the Laboratory of Cultural and Social Anthropology (LACS) at the University of Lausanne. He recently completed a four-year research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation on the relationship between lithium extraction and the contradictions of the wider green energy transition. During the academic year 2023-2024, he is writing a book based on this research for the University of California Press.
His wide-ranging publications and public scholarship include sixteen sole-authored, edited, and coedited books. His most recent are Reinventing Human Rights (Stanford University Press, 2022), The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2021), and A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2019). In addition to his academic writing, his nonfiction essays have appeared in literary journals such as The Paris Review and Boston Review, and he has been quoted as an expert in publications including The New York Times, The Guardian, The Washington Post, The Nation, and Le Monde.
Chair: Professor Maya Unnithan
Discussant: Dr Daniela Soto Hernandez
To RSVP please email Caroline.Bennett@sussex.ac.uk or Alice.Wilson@sussex.ac.uk by Friday 20 October.
All welcome!