Vivian Price and IGUS invites you to a conversation about just energy transitions: Why are the thoughts of workers important in pondering energy transitions? How can we understand what impact transitions have on various communities? In what ways can visual methods communicate these ideas differently from text?
Wealthy countries have responded to calls to support energy transitions in the global South by employing strategies that further enrich private capital. Employing the rhetoric of just transition, Western financial institutions are phasing out coal in South Africa and privatizing energy with empty promises to provide jobs and help communities dependent on the coal economy.
Meanwhile investors seek to exploit opportunities to extract critical minerals needed for the green economy, such as the rich deposits of lithium in Chile, where unions in this sector are weak and Indigenous communities fear losing their access to water. What interventions have unions and community organizations made to resist the forces of green imperialism? How does the government’s partial nationalization strategy respond to the interests of local interests?
Based on interviews and news footage, this short film examines how members of the National Union of Mineworkers in S. Africa and the Movement for Lithium in Chile as well as Indigenous communities are pushing back.
The seminar is open to everyone, no registration is required.
Bio
Vivian Price, PhD, Professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills & former union electrician, is a researcher and filmmaker for US and international projects on labor and climate justice. She was a Fulbright scholar at the University of Liverpool, a Fulbright specialist in Norway, working with the WAGE team at the University of Oslo on the perspective of oil workers where she directed Talking Union, Talking Climate.
She’s a member of the Climate Industry Research Team for the Canadian Building Trades Union on climate literacy in the construction industry. She directed Voices from the green transition to disseminate findings for a project on just transition based in the Leeds University Business School.
As a member of the Labor Network for Sustainability research group for the Critical Minerals Just Transition Listening Project (Sloan Foundation), she studies e-battery manufacturing plants. Price received funding from 2025 Legitimacy and is now a visiting scholar at the University of Helsinki using film to promote exchange between forestry workers and environmentalists.
Organiser
The department of global development and planning
Contact person:
- camilla.mevik@uia.no
- Phone
- +47 38 14 10 21