Agenda

Anna Lora-Wainwright
University di Oxford

Co-noticing the industrial monster: care and belonging in Taranto

Abstract
This paper draws on a collaborative project with Raffaele Ippolito, Maaret Jokela- Pansini and Beth Greenhough on experiences of environmental risk in Taranto, Italy. Taranto is situated next to the second largest steel plant in Europe, as well as an oil refinery, an industrial port and several landfills, earning it the status of high-risk environmental area. Contrary to previous scholarship suggesting that pollution can result in alienating residents from their lived environment, our research shows that acute awareness of environmental risks does not necessarily undermine attachment to place but rather can co-exist with or even strengthen it, a process we term “co-noticing”. Combining long-term ethnographic research with an online-based survey, the paper illustrates how residents create safety through everyday practices and through discourses which assert belonging but also emotional detachment from pollution and institutional failures. We argue that expressions of emotional detachment towards pollution and resentment towards institutional negligence are ways to cope with aspects which lie beyond their control. Performing disaffection also serves to defiantly reassert their entitlement to remain in Taranto, in spite of the severe burden of exposure to pollution. Insights gleaned through extended ethnographic engagement invite attention to the complex and contradictory sentiments and practices which pollution and belonging invoke in residents. They serve as a caution against any simplistic assumption that risk awareness inevitably leads to residents leaving the contaminated place or, conversely, that refusal to leave stems from ignorance or poverty.

Nota biografica
Anna Lora-Wainwright is Professor of Human Geography of China at the University of Oxford. She trained in anthropology and Chinese studies, and carried out ethnographic research in rural China for over a decade on topics including illness, welfare, pollution, activism, urbanisation and waste. She is the author of two monographs and of numerous peer-reviewed articles. She is currently researching care and solidarity among Chinese communities in Italy and the UK and moving her long-term interests in environmental justice from China to Italy, more specifically Taranto. She is co-investigator on the MISTRAL project (funded by Horizon2020 and UKRI). More information can be found on her academic webpage.

Seminario valido per il tirocinio DEA/ACEL
Coordinatrice: Franca Tamisari: tamisari@unive.it