When Empowered Futures alumna, Anna-Sophie Hobi, began her PhD, Europe was in the middle of what many described as, or hoped to be, a new industrial revolution. Governments and companies were racing to build battery gigafactories – massive production sites intended to supply the growing demand for electric vehicles and renewable energy storage. Norway, already a global leader in electrification, became a hotspot for these plans. But behind the headlines and political ambitions, Anna-Sophie saw an opportunity to ask deeper questions: What does industrial growth mean for a community? Why do certain futures become desirable? And how do everyday people attach meaning to large-scale industry?
These questions would define her doctoral research, unfolding across several years, multiple field sites, and a rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape.
Anna-Sophie’s research centered on one of Norway’s earliest gigafactory proposals in Arendal, a coastal town in southern Norway. Beginning around 2019, Norway saw a wave of such proposals – projects promising jobs, economic renewal, and alignment with national climate ambitions. As she explains, “These factories were much celebrated… People seemed to support it and I really wanted to figure out why.”
Her initial aim was straightforward: understanding the local political processes surrounding the establishment of a gigafactory. But as fieldwork unfolded, the story became far richer. She found that the support surrounding the Arendal project was not simply a matter of economic promise or environmental policy. It was deeply embedded in culture, identity, and local history.
At the time she began her fieldwork, Europe’s energy transition narrative was clear. Batteries were the future – green, scalable, and central to decarbonisation. But in 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine triggered a massive energy crisis. Suddenly, energy security overshadowed sustainability, and many gigafactory proposals collapsed.
Anna-Sophie had chosen the one project that kept moving forward. “I was lucky with my selection,” she says.
Rather than focusing on technology or markets, Anna-Sophie immersed herself in the everyday world of municipal employees. For months, she followed planners, administrators, and local battery company staff as they navigated meetings, negotiations, and public communication.
The more she listened, the more she realised that industrial futures are not solely constructed from national policy documents or glossy corporate promises – they are woven from local understandings of what a “good life” and a “good society” should look like.
Across conversations and documents, she found narratives deeply rooted in Norwegian industrial history: a belief that using natural resources responsibly and productively is central to national identity: “part of an understanding of what it means to belong to the Norwegian society”, she notes. For many in Arendal, the gigafactory represented a continuation of this story.
Local leaders talked about jobs and taxation, yes, but also about dignity, belonging, contribution, and pride. Economic growth became tied to ethical ideas about one’s role in society. Even concerns about the town’s declining vibrancy and its once-wealthy shipping heritage fed into the desire for industrial revival.
To contextualise Arendal’s story, Anna-Sophie extended her fieldwork beyond Norway. She travelled to Skellefteå in Sweden, home to Northvolt’s pioneering gigafactory – later embroiled in financial collapse – and to Mo i Rana in northern Norway, where another battery company built a facility that today stands empty. These cases revealed both the fragility of the battery boom and the human impacts of corporate decisions, geopolitics, and state support.
Amid the rise and fall of these projects, she continually returned to the deeper question: What does industrial hope look like?
Her findings show that industrial promises are never just economic – they are cultural, emotional, and aspirational.
Anna-Sophie’s interest in industry began long before the battery boom. Her academic journey started in archaeology, with an early fascination for tools, trade, and resource use. In social anthropology, she gravitated toward mining and natural resource governance, culminating in a master’s thesis on copper extraction and civil society participation in Zambia.
Coming from Switzerland – one of the world’s major commodity trading hubs – she felt a sense of responsibility to examine the global impacts of resource extraction. Batteries, with their heavy reliance on minerals like lithium, cobalt, manganese, and graphite, became a natural next step.
Her PhD plans initially pointed toward lithium mining in Zimbabwe. Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, closing borders and forcing her to rethink everything. It was precisely during that time that the gigafactory wave hit Norway. Serendipity, she notes, played its part: “Maybe thanks to the pandemic, I was able to look at this.”
Today, Anna-Sophie works as a researcher for a foundation involved in track‑three diplomacy – supporting negotiations in conflict and post-conflict contexts around the world. While the work differs from ethnographic fieldwork, she draws heavily on what she learned during the PhD.
“Anything I learned about broader geopolitics, about markets, about economic competition between countries, the role of corporations in global politics, the role of technologies and energy and resources. I think all that has been really, really helpful,” she says. Her doctoral training sharpened her ability to understand complex, interconnected global systems, and that expertise now informs diplomatic and conflict-resolution efforts far beyond Scandinavia.
As one of the first members of the Empowered Futures research school, Anna-Sophie describes the experience as “super motivating” following the isolation of the pandemic. The interdisciplinary environment gave her a sense of belonging, despite studying something as seemingly industrial as batteries.
Collaborations sparked naturally: co-authored blogs, joint articles, workshops on rare earths and hydropower history, and friendships that continue today. She highlights the network as a key resource – an ongoing, supportive community of experts navigating their early careers.
Anna-Sophie’s PhD journey shows that the energy transition is not only about technologies or climate targets. It is also about the people who imagine, negotiate, and live within these futures. Her work reveals how deeply intertwined industry is with identity, hope, and everyday life – especially in communities like Arendal searching for purpose, pride, and renewed energy.
In a moment when global transitions are accelerating and narratives of progress shift quickly, Anna-Sophie’s research offers something vital: a reminder that behind every industrial plan are human stories shaping, resisting, and redefining what the future should be.