Presentation short abstract

This paper explores how the EU’s push to onshore lithium value chains revives cultural imaginaries that cast it as a remedy for excess. Using ethnography in Germany’s Ore Mountains, we trace how these imaginaries articulate notions of “enoughness” and drive political action in energy transitions.

Presentation long abstract

Lithium has emerged as a central element in the global political, economic, and cultural imaginaries of energy transitions—promising both environmental sustainability and economic growth. In Europe, discourses around the need to onshore lithium value chains continue to shape political agendas, even as their material dimensions remain elusive amid economic speculation and shifting demands for battery materials. By studying lithium from historical, cultural and political perspectives, this paper explores the relationship between the discursive and the real with an emphasis on how the concept of enoughness is articulated within these orders. While historic and contemporary imaginaries point to lithium as a remedy for excess (e.g. against psychological disorders and for combatting climate change), lithium projects ‘in the making’ reveal how hegemonic imaginaries become articulated and expressed through unequal power relations in targeted sites of extraction. Ethnographic research on a planned lithium project in Germany’s Ore Mountains illustrates how imaginaries shape socio-ecological relations, even when they may never materialize as “real.” In this context, enoughness is understood either as a shift away from fossil fuels and geopolitical dependency or as an ethical-political stance against environmental destruction and the relentless expansion of energy and economic systems. We thereby situate lithium onshoring as a pillar of the symbolic and material orders underpinning energy transitions, challenging taken-for-granted assumptions of techno-centric solutionism.