Studying lithium-ion batteries across and beyond companies, states and the environment

This article explores how questions of global anthropology and sociology can contribute to the analysis of lithium-ion battery production and circulation, by reviewing critically the institutional approaches that foreground and legitimize how companies and states foster electric vehicles to tackle global environmental degradation. The article shows how analyses can go beyond this framing by studying how companies, states and imaginaries about the environment and humanity result from multiple power relations that cannot be subsumed under a single logic, and that intersect with social hierarchies established in terms of gender, class, nation, race, age, location and religion, among others. Attentive to this multiplicity, this work explores various scales, imaginaries, connections and interdependences, reflecting on how notions of environment and humanity also inform, normatively and conceptually, some of the social scientific analyses themselves.

Automated summary

This article explores the contribution of global anthropology and sociology to the analysis of lithium-ion battery production and circulation, by critically reviewing institutional approaches. It shows how the analysis should go beyond the framing of companies and states tackling global environmental degradation and consider multiple power relations and social hierarchies.