Research Seminar Series: Creating safety through belonging and disaffection in a Southern Italian steel town

Presenter: Anna Lora-Wainwright, University of Oxford

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.

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.