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Paper short abstract

This paper examines migrant Berom youths in uncontrolled lithium mining in Igbeti, Nigeria, highlighting how ethnographic fieldwork navigates political tension, ethical dilemmas, and competing local and global narratives in green transition contexts.

Paper long abstract

Lithium mining occupies a contradictory position within contemporary environmental politics: it is promoted globally as essential to green energy transitions, yet locally experienced through extractive labour, environmental disruption, and social precarity. Drawing on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in Igbeti, Southwestern Nigeria, this paper will examine how these tensions shape the mobility of migrant Berom youths working in largely uncontrolled lithium mining operations with Chinese actors and minimal government oversight.

Using youth mobility as an analytical lens, the paper will show how migrant workers engage lithium mining as both a source of income and a site of ecological and social risk. For these youths, lithium extraction will be examined not as an abstract climate solution but as a daily reality shaped by degraded land, insecure labour arrangements, and uncertain prospects. Their movements across regions, worksites, and social networks will show how global green transition narratives translate unevenly into local livelihoods and environmental knowledge.

The paper will also address the challenges of conducting ethnography in a politically sensitive and loosely regulated extractive context marked by competing claims from mining actors, state authorities, host communities, and migrant workers. Lithium’s designation as a “green” resource will unsettle distinctions between ethical and harmful extraction, raising questions of researcher position, access, and interpretation. By examining youth mobility within these contested environmental and political conditions, the paper will argue for treating fieldwork as a practice shaped by conflicting scales, knowledge, and moral claims.