Bipolar Transitions: Situated Worlds, Uneven Futures

From the lithium-rich salt flats of northern Chile to the electrified megacities of China and the green recycling dreams of Norway, transitions reshape our planet in situated and uneven ways. This roundtable, part of the Worlds of Lithium project  (www.worldsoflithium.eu), mobilizes the concept of “bipolar transitions” (Weinberg & Bonelli 2021) to understand how technological replacements unfold through unstable humors — not just moods, but vital fluids entangled with land, water, and human and non human bodies. Rather than fixed North–South geographies, bipolar transitions invites us to trace polarities of humor — manic and depressive — as they surface unevenly across bodies, territories, and infrastructures. These humors often coexist, overlap, and clash: manic drives to extract and decarbonize entangled with melancholic residues of depletion and loss. This is not just a metaphor of disorder, but a conceptual tool to grasp how transitions reorganize time, space, and matter through instability, friction, and excess. 

It is in this spirit that we return to Italo Calvino’s provocation: “The inferno of the living is already here. But who and what is not inferno — and how do we help it endure?” This roundtable asks: Who and what is not inferno — here, now, in the midst of transitions — and how do we learn to recognize it, care for it, and make space for it to persist? 

About the speakers

Andrew Barry (University College London) is a human geographer whose work explores the relations between science, politics, and the environment. He is the author of Political Machines and Material Politics, and co-editor of Interdisciplinarity. His recent projects examine energy infrastructures, transitions, and geopolitical events, with fieldwork in Georgia, Italy, and the Caucasus. Barry develops the concept of “chemical geographies” to understand environmental transformation in the Anthropocene. He co-leads UCL’s Anthropocene initiative and teaches at the Department of Geography. 

Cristóbal Bonelli (University of Amsterdam) is an anthropologist and clinical psychologist working at the intersection of ecological crisis, energy infrastructures, and technopolitical transformation. Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam, he leads the ERC project Worlds of Lithium, which investigates how lithium-based transitions reconfigure territories, ecologies, and forms of life across Chile, China, and Norway. His work combines ethnographic experimentation and interdisciplinary inquiry to explore how environmental processes, material systems, and modes of coexistence are remade in the wake of technological change. 

Amade M’charek (University of Amsterdam) is an anthropologist of science whose work explores the entanglements of race, forensics, and postcolonial politics. She is the author of The Human Genome Diversity Project and leads the ERC project Vital Elements, which reconceptualizes forensics as an art of paying attention to the circulations and inequalities embedded in Mediterranean migration. Her research examines how bodies, borders, and biological data become vital sites of intervention in Europe’s racial and colonial regimes. M’charek co-leads Pressing Matter, a national research program on colonial heritage, and teaches at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam.

David Tyfield (Lancaster University) is a scholar of sustainable transitions and political economy, with a focus on China and urban futures. His work explores China’s ‘ecological civilisation’, examining the co-evolution of knowledge, infrastructure, and governance with a focus on urban mobilities. Author of Liberalism 2.0 and the Rise of China and The Economics of Science. Co-editor of Mobilities and Associate Director of the Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe) 

Mario Blaser (Memorial University of Newfoundland) is an anthropologist whose work explores Indigenous struggles, colonialism, and ontological conflicts over territory, development, and conservation. He is the author of Storytelling Globalization and co-editor of A World of Many Worlds. His research develops the framework of political ontology to examine how clashes between worlds and worldings shape extractive and environmental disputes. Blaser’s current work investigates “infrastructures of emplacement” that sustain plural modes of existence through long-term collaborations with Indigenous communities.