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Reconfigurations of Life Cycle Assessment: Valuing Life over Lithium

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Conference

2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Baltimore , Maryland

Publication Date

June 25, 2023

Start Date

June 25, 2023

End Date

June 28, 2023

Conference Session

Equity, Culture & Social Justice in Education Division (EQUITY) Technical Session 5

Tagged Divisions

Equity and Culture & Social Justice in Education Division (EQUITY)

Tagged Topic

Diversity

Page Count

14

DOI

10.18260/1-2--44032

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/44032

Download Count

322

Paper Authors

biography

Joey Valle Purdue University

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Joseph 'Joey' Valle is a queer latine Jew with ancestors tracing back through present day Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Eastern Europe. They are employed as a postdoctoral worker in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. Dr. Valle received a Ph.D in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor after defending their thesis on Abolitionist Engineering: An Autoethnographic Approach to Understanding How Abolition Can Transform Materials Science and Engineering. Presently they work at intersections of equity and engineering workforce development in the ASPIRE (Advancing Sustainability through Powered Infrastructure for Roadway Electrification) Engineering Research Center.

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biography

Nafissa Aïda Maïga

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Nafissa is a Ph.D. graduate student in Engineering Education and a master's student in Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University. She spent most of her life in Mali where neocolonialism remains significant in the education system. Nafissa has a strong interest in Indigenous knowledge, colonization, and sustainability.

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Roshan Krishnan

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Jessica Ng

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John Mulrow

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Abstract

Within much of dominant engineering education that focuses on sustainability, a narrative exists that electric vehicles are a seemingly universal good in combating climate change. Common sense within dominant engineering culture has been constructed to frame lithium as a critical element in ‘green’ energy storage that underpins U.S. based technological moves away from fossil fuels. The analytic of life cycle assessment (LCA), as a technique that purports to account for the environmental aspects associated with a ‘product’ over its life cycle, is often used to generate the data legitimizing these narratives. Yet the accountings LCA offers obscure much of the context any analyzed product is situated within. Taking an exemplary focus on the drive toward transportation electrification via lithium based energy storage technologies, this work in progress paper looks into death-making onto-epistemic underpinnings and metanarratives LCA provides cover for. Here, an interwoven framework of abolition, degrowth, and environmental justice is offered as a lens to analyze what maintains present constructions of LCA. Focusing on LCAs of lithium ion batteries (LIB)s offers a window into the constructions of symbolic life advanced in dominant engineering. Deconstructing the foundations of this death-making understanding of life as product in LCA offers a basis for reorienting engineering education involving LCA toward non-dominant narratives rooted in the affirmation of life.

Valle, J., & Maïga, N. A., & Krishnan, R., & Ng, J., & Mulrow, J. (2023, June), Reconfigurations of Life Cycle Assessment: Valuing Life over Lithium Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--44032

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