Paper short abstract:

Drawing on an ethnography with emigrants from Sulcis-Iglesiente, Sardinia, Italy, this paper explores how industrialization and de-industrialization articulate with emigration and peripheralization, building a tentative framework to analyze some future trajectories currently emerging in the region.

Paper long abstract:

Sulcis-Iglesiente, a historic region in south-western Sardinia, has been often labeled by national discourse as the “poorest province in Europe”. In fact, the region presents a strong demographic decline, a notable aging of the population and high unemployment rates. An important mining area since the late XVIII century, Sulcis-Iglesiente has gone through a rapid process of state-driven industrialization since the 1960s, and through an equally fast process of de-industrialization at the end of 1990s.

Building on fieldwork with Sardinian migrants who left the region since the 1960s onwards, the paper aims to provide an understanding of identity construction processes linked to industrialization and de-industrialization using migrants’ narratives and representations. Drawing from migrant experiences, it examines the links between emigration and industrialization and their connection to broader economic and political scales. The analysis illuminates how the peripheralization of the region was and is produced.

De-industrialization in Sulcis-Iglesiente raises socio-environmental concerns about the future of the industrial heritage, opening up new scenarios connected with the emergence of new economies and industries (e.g. the industry of mining heritage, the tourist industry, the green economy industry) in the context of the “ecological transition”. These emerging trajectories, still uncertain and contested, raise important questions, that invite us to investigate frictions and connections (Tsing, 2004) between emigration, peripheralization and global processes of economic restructuring within the framework of the “sustainable development” imperative promoted by supranational institutions such as the UN.