Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper examines how the committee Torino Respira mobilises citizen science to make air pollution legally actionable. Through a community-based eco-ethnographic approach, it explores the epistemic and political tensions of translating lived harm into evidence for environmental justice.

Paper long abstract

This paper draws on the Right to Clean Air research project, which examines public participation in the enforcement of science-based environmental policies, with particular attention to the access to justice. The project adopts an interdisciplinary approach that combines medical anthropology, environmental sociology, and green criminology. Focusing onTurin, the contribution analyses the role of the citizen committee Torino Respira in one of Italy’s first criminal proceedings concerning air pollution. The case is interpreted through the lens of green criminology, conceptualising air pollution as a form of slow environmental violence produced by anthropogenic and “chronic” disasters. Within this framework, the paper addresses the persistent gap between harm as experienced by affected communities and its recognition as crime. Empirically, the paper examines how Torino Respira has engaged in practices of citizen science to render pollution-related harm visible and legally actionable. Through air quality monitoring, engagement with epidemiological studies, collaboration with experts, and the circulation of counter-analyses, activists have sought to meet the demanding standards of proof required in the criminal arena, where environmental victims often bear the burden of demonstrating causal links between exposure and disease. Ethnographic research conducted with the committee highlights both the empowering potential of citizen science and its ambivalences, including the concentration of epistemic and emotional labour on civic actors.The paper argues that community-based and eco-ethnographic approaches are crucial for understanding how citizen science operates, not only as a technical tool but as a situated, relational, and politically charged form of knowledge-making in struggles for environmental justice.