CUSAS Brown Bag Lunch with Mark Goodale

CUSAS is hosting Professor Mark Goodale for a Brown Bag lunch, a space for staff members to informally speak to students about their career development, research interests, and the world of social anthropology. No sign-up required. Please find an abstract of the talk below:

Locating Lithium within Scales of Time, Place, and Ideology

This workshop will discuss the different methodological and theoretical questions around a current book project, which is based on four years of ethnographic research on the entanglement of lithium extraction in Bolivia with the wider so-called green energy transition. In this informal meeting, the presenter will sketch the main difficulties from an anthropological perspective and point to emerging lines of analysis, which will be followed by open comparative discussion with participants about their own research projects.

Mark Goodale is a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME) and a member of St Antony’s College. He is also Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology and Director of the Laboratory of Cultural and Social Anthropology (LACS) at the University of Lausanne. He recently completed a four-year research project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation on the relationship between lithium extraction and the contradictions of the wider green energy transition. During the academic year 2023-2024, he is writing a book based on this research for the University of California Press.

His wide-ranging publications and public scholarship include sixteen sole-authored, edited, and coedited books. His most recent are Reinventing Human Rights (Stanford University Press, 2022), The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology (Oxford University Press, 2021), and A Revolution in Fragments: Traversing Scales of Justice, Ideology, and Practice in Bolivia (Duke University Press, 2019).