Project Description:

Battery-powered Electric Vehicles and Sustainability: Too good to be True?

Nilufer Yapici, PhD. & Ratan Dheer, PhD.

Battery-powered Electric Vehicles (BEVs) are hailed worldwide thanks to their sustainability claims despite their production involving severe environmental and social costs. BEVs and events surrounding them are selectively perceived, interpreted, and signified, forming a story imbued with values, viewpoints, and commonsense assumptions. In our project we seek to understand initially a) why the auto industry’s BEV perspective regarding BEV and sustainability is preferred over the other perspectives and b) how the consensus surrounding this perspective is built.

We build on theories of hegemony (Gramsci, 1971; Nyberg, Spicer, & Wright, 2013; Levy, Reinecke & Manning, 2016) and Hall’s (2019) theorization on communication to argue that automotive companies have built consensus through a dominant narrative that defines sustainability narrowly, which marginalizes or omits critical issues such as lithium and cobalt mining, slave and child labor associated with extraction of these minerals along with environmental degradation. We will be using qualitative analysis to examine the archival data we gathered. Based on the nature of the findings, we may use quantitative analysis, as well.