China, South America, and the Eco-Modernist Path to Sustainability
As China leads the global race for electromobility, its vision of Ecological Civilisation fuels both paths to sustainability and global competition. How do New Energy technologies reshape planetary linkages? This talk explores the hidden socio-environmental and geo-economic tensions behind the ‘clean’ promise of electromobility. Q&A after the talk.
Speaker: Pablo Ampuero-Ruiz, IIAS Fellow and Assistant Professor, Dept. of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
You can join online via Zoom or in person in the IIAS conference room from 13:00 to 14:30 hrs. Amsterdam Time/CEST.
All are welcome; registration is required due to limited seating and to receive the Zoom link.
The Lecture
Energy storage capabilities have been at the centre of technological debates on sustainable futures. In recent years, Electric Vehicles powered by lithium-ion batteries have gained traction as a viable solution to take internal combustion engines off the streets, with Chinese companies taking an important part of these global markets. But while the expansion of electromobility has opened the door to imagine paths to decarbonisation, less consideration has been given to its emerging socioenvironmental and geoeconomic challenges. Growing concerns about the extraction and processing of critical battery minerals have increasingly met the intensification of competition between industrial economies for controlling access to minerals, increased participation in battery production, and the protection of national car industries. Focusing on the People’s Republic of China, these concerns have been framed under the policy-concept of ‘Ecological Civilisation’, which seeks to promote New Energy infrastructures and technologies as both a matter of environmental moralities and national sovereignty. In this presentation, I explore the linkages between the techno-modernist imagination embedded in Ecological Civilisation and its extension through investments in critical minerals, such as lithium and copper, in South America. In this constellation, the promotion of New Energy technologies for Ecological Civilisation portends the reproduction of socio-technological and geo-economic inequalities that are downplayed, even invisibilised, by the embedded morality of electromobility and its materials as ‘green’ and ‘clean’.
Q&A
After the talk, there will be a Q&A moderated by Jens Damm, Visiting Chair of Taiwan Studies at Leiden University and IIAS.
The Speaker
Dr Pablo Ampuero-Ruiz is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam, and a Visiting Fellow of the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden. A trained social anthropologist and historian, he is currently developing a research agenda exploring the links between finance and transition minerals in the production of a ‘green economy’ between China and South America. Pablo did his PhD at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. Besides his current work on green economy transitions, his research has explored diverse aspects of electromobility, migrant labour in China, and Sino-Latin American relations, and he has lectured and researched in several South American, Chinese and European institutions. Pablo is also a photo-documentalist, with part of his work published by National Geographic; he hosts a Spanish-language podcast about the contemporary transformations in East Asia called ‘Todo Bajo el Cielo’.
Registration
You can join online via Zoom or in person in the IIAS conference room. All are welcome; registration is required due to limited seating and to receive the Zoom link.