March 29, 2025 | Category: Workshop
Bonelli and Weinberg
Cristóbal Bonelli and Marina Weinberg, both researchers from the Worlds of Lithium (WOL) project, will participate in the seminar "Territorialidades Divergentes en América del Sur", organized by Mario Blaser and Cristina Rojas in Asunción, Paraguay, from April 9 to April 11, 2025. This gathering will bring together scholars working across Latin America to explore how different ways of inhabiting and shaping territories challenge dominant frameworks of modernization and development.
Bonelli will present his work "Gardens at the Edge of the Falling Sky", where he reflects on how energy transitions reshape landscapes and ways of living. Focusing on lithium mining in northern Chile, his talk will explore how extraction projects not only transform ecosystems but also affect the ways in which local communities perceive and engage with their surroundings. Inspired by the ideas of Davi Kopenawa and Bernard Stiegler, Bonelli invites us to think beyond simple narratives of sustainability and consider what remains, resists, and reconfigures in these shifting terrains.
Weinberg, in turn, will present "Between the Pluriverse and the Multiverse: Lithium Off-sites, Capitalist Science Fiction, and World-Making". Her talk explores how lithium infrastructures generate unexpected spatial and temporal displacements—what she calls “off-sites”—that challenge the dominant techno-scientific imagination of the energy transition. Drawing on speculative thought and grounded fieldwork, Weinberg examines how alternative world-making practices emerge in the cracks of extractive capitalism.
The seminar will also feature contributions from scholars including Pilar Riaño, Daniel Ruiz Serna, Salvador Schavelzon, Lorna Quiroga, José Candido Ferreira, Cristina Rojas, and Toribia Lero Quispe, along with local participants and community organizations. Through open discussions and collaborative reflections, the event aims to generate new insights into the diverse ways territories are shaped, contested, and lived.
Stay tuned for updates on this exciting gathering in Paraguay!