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Paper short abstract

In the Augusta–Siracusa petrochemical corridor, an “Eco-Justice” campaign and a workshop I convened show eco-ethnographic citizen science as justice-work, and how “repair” is discussed in the context of detoxification, and how justice claims translate into demands for remediation/accountability.

Paper long abstract

Eco-Giustizia Subito! (“Eco-Justice now!”) is a travelling eco-justice campaign that visits Italy’s Sites of National Interest (SIN) to demand enforceable remediation (bonifiche), application of the polluter-pays principle, and democratic oversight of industrial transition. This paper offers an eco-ethnography of the campaign’s stop in the Siracusa–Augusta petrochemical corridor, focusing on two public formats: a demonstration organized by Legambiente and a workshop/ public discussion that I convened with local participants and invited experts.

Drawing on Zenker & Wolf’s “new anthropology of justice in the Anthropocene,” I treat justice as an analytic that makes visible how the campaign assemble: (1) subjects of justice, (2) objects of justice, (3) responsible agents, and (4) concerned agents. I argue that these categories are not given in advance but are actively produced through specific public and participatory formats. I show how the Legambiente (a national environmental organisation) demonstration produces public address and moral pressure, while the workshop and discussion operate as eco-ethnographic citizen science: they translate embodied knowledge of toxicity into shared problem definitions, negotiate evidence, and clarify what “responsibility” could mean in practice.

The paper also highlights pitfalls: credibility struggles around data and expertise; uneven labor and exposure; and the risk of responsibilizing affected communities to produce their own justice. Following Zenker and Wolf, I argue that the political force of these hybrid formats lies in reclaiming the human as a necessary category of responsibility and action, not as an abstract or universal subject, but through the situated naming of duty-bearers and claims for public restitution.