WOL Final Conference

🗓️ June 12–13, 2025

📍 University Library, University of Amsterdam

What kinds of transformations unfolded as lithium traveled—across continents, deserts, laboratories, financial dreams, and fractured ecologies?

For five years, Worlds of Lithium followed these travels, not to draw a global map of supply chains, but to attend to the places they disturb, animate, and reconfigure.

From the mining territories of northern Chile to the industrial and urban landscapes of China and the experimental infrastructures of Norway, the project explored how strategies to decarbonize transport do not simply take place—they make place, bringing into contact heterogeneous worlds, temporalities, and ways of knowing.

This final conference marked the end of a collective experiment in tracing how energy transitions are lived—not as smooth technical replacements, but as contested and uneven reorganizations of life.

Titled After Replacements / Transforming Transitions, the event created a space for reflecting on what endures, what resists, and what quietly insists amid planetary change.

Keynote Speakers:
Gabrielle Hecht – Stanford University
Andrew Barry – University College London
Mario Blaser – Memorial University
David Tyfield – Lancaster University

Public Roundtable at SPUI25

Bipolar Transitions: Situated Worlds, Uneven Futures
🗓️ June 12, 20:00 – SPUI25, Amsterdam

This roundtable introduced the concept of bipolar transitions to name the affective and material instabilities of our climate moment.

Participants discussed how transitions do not simply replace one system with another. Rather, they fracture, pulse, and recombine. They unfold through unstable humors—manic drives to electrify and decarbonize entangled with melancholic residues of depletion, loss, and exhaustion.

From lithium-rich deserts to electrified megacities, the conversation addressed how transitions reorganize not just energy systems, but worlds. It asked: how can we stay with what resists conversion, with what endures unevenly?