Short Abstract

This panel explores the material dimensions of the energy transition amid a global mining boom for critical minerals. It examines how various actors construct knowledge and visions of future transitions and mining, the controversies these generate, and their political implications worldwide.

Description

The mineral foundations on which the energy transition relies are becoming an increasingly prominent and politicized issue in both the Global North and South. To electrify a wide range of uses and move away from a fossil-fuel-based world, resources such as lithium, rare earth elements, and copper are required to produce transition technologies (wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles). In Europe, the connection between transition and extraction is also driven by concerns related to sovereignty and security of supply, in order to strengthen political autonomy vis-à-vis other powers such as Russia or China. However, this renewed promotion of the mining industry is highly contested, both by local communities affected by extraction projects and by a variety of organizations calling for demand-reduction policies and ecological resource planning.

This panel explores the material dimensions of the energy transition by examining how a variety of public and private actors produce and mobilize expert knowledge about its possible futures. Several questions will be addressed: How do actors construct knowledge about desirable futures for mining and raw materials? What controversies surround these forms of knowledge? How do they reshape—or fail to reshape—the ways mining is governed, conceptualized, or implemented across the world? How do actors problematize the energy transition in relation to materiality, and what are the political consequences of this process?

The panel will focus on expert knowledge produced by academic disciplines—such as law, geology, or economics—policy practices that mobilize these disciplines, and situated forms of knowledge developed by those directly affected by energy transition projects, including communities impacted by mining. This panel contributes to recent STS scholarship on the making of futures and on the politics of expertise.

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