Short Abstract

This panel and creative workshop session explore the electrification of transport as both material and imaginative practice, inviting feminist and decolonial approaches that reimagine energy, mobility, and resilience beyond extractivism and displacement.

Description

Socio-technical futures worth desiring require learning to live—and die—well in the Necrocene (McBrien 2017; Casid 2019). As attachments to fossil modernity loosen, the dominant re-attachment has become green growth—a discursive chain that translates sustainability into decarbonization and decarbonization into capital-driven renewable expansion (Szeman & Boyer, 2017). The electrification of transport exemplifies this paradox. While promising cleaner futures, lithium battery infrastructures extend extractive frontiers and reproduce colonial, racialised, and gendered dependencies (Bridge, 2013; Riofrancos, 2020; Bonelli & Dorador 2021). Feminist and decolonial STS perspectives help us see that technological change is never purely technical but always social, political, and situated (Haraway, 1988; Barad, 2007). Drawing on Mario Blaser’s notion of displacement—the ongoing colonial, universalizing movement of worlds and meanings that renders some relations possible while erasing others (2025) —we examine how electrified futures not only move electrons but also people, materials, and worlds.

This panel and workshop session invite scholars, artists, and activists to explore material, political, and speculative engagements with lithium-based mobility. We welcome work that examines supply-chain governance, exposes invisibilized inequalities, or imagines post-extractive and caring mobilities through creative and speculative methods.

Following Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), which reimagines the first technology as a vessel for gathering rather than a weapon of conquest, we treat stories and technologies as containers for relation and care. This shift from spear to carrier bag opens speculative space for imagining electrified futures grounded in reciprocity rather than extraction.

A hands-on zine-making workshop follows the panel, translating research into accessible forms and co-imagining future transport options without displacement. We employ collage making, found materials, and poetry excerpts into creating and presenting.

At the intersection of ontology, ethics, and politics, we ask: How can STS help power otherwise—toward futures of mobility that emplace rather than extract?

Propose contribution