📢 Webinar: Where is the ‘lithium valley’? Extractivist discourses in three territories
📅 September 16th, 2025
⏰ 9 – 11 am (PST) / 1 – 3 pm (Brasília) / 5 – 7 pm (London)
Explore how lithium extraction is reshaping communities in the US, Brazil, and Zimbabwe.
There isn’t one Lithium Valley. At least three different locations have been labelled ‘lithium valleys’ as a way to evoke the technological development of Silicon Valley, whilst proposing to transform territories to extract a single mineral.
In 2023, the Jequitinhonha Valley in Brazil was branded ‘The Lithium Valley’ by government and mining companies at a Nasdaq bell-ringing initiative. The Bikita region in Zimbabwe appears in media headlines as ‘the world’s next lithium valley’. The lithium valley in California is a project to extract ‘the greenest lithium in the world’ from geothermal waters in the region of Salton Sea.
This webinar will gather Alejandro Artiga-Purcell (San José State University, USA), Mikhail Aruberito (Shine Collab, Zimbabwe) and Aline Weber Sulzbacher (Federal University of the Valleys and the Semiarid Region–UFVJM, Brazil), with moderation by Francisco Calafate-Faria (LIQUIT / London South Bank University, UK), to discuss the narrative strategies that promote the establishment of so-called Lithium Valleys around the world and their implications.
We will hear critical perspectives on the green and just transition discourses of extractivist projects that threaten to disrupt the possibilities of other socio-ecological futures. But what does it mean to brand a whole region after one metal? What is being suppressed with that discourse?
The webinar is a preliminary event to the Symposium that will take place on September 25–26 in London and online. Click here to register for the Symposium →
🎤 Webinar Speakers
Alejandro Artiga-Purcell
San José State University, USA. His work explores the social and environmental consequences of extractivism and the narratives around energy transitions.
Mikhail Aruberito
Shine Collab, Zimbabwe. Works with communities on questions of resource justice and the impacts of lithium and other mineral extraction.
Aline Weber Sulzbacher
Federal University of the Valleys and the Semiarid Region (UFVJM), Brazil. Researcher in geography and political ecology with a focus on rural communities and extractivism.
Francisco Calafate-Faria (Moderator)
LIQUIT / London South Bank University, UK. Researcher on political ecology, extractivism and energy transitions.
