Presentation short abstract

This paper addresses the changing meaning and experience of smells in the making and unmaking of oil-based industrial sensescapes. It suggests the relevance of the Gramscian notion of common sense for a possible sensorial political ecology.

Presentation long abstract

This paper addresses the changing meaning and experience of smells in the making and unmaking of industrial sensescapes as a social and political process. Building on extensive ethnographic research in two industrial regions in Italy (Brindisi) and Portugal (Sines), the paper examines a broad range of accounts, experiences and sensorial representations of noxiousness and pollution, within and outside the factories. Over several decades of entanglement with oil-based production, smells emerge as ambiguous traces of socioenvironmental transformation, controversially embedded in dominant narratives of development and modernization. Smells surface as corporeal memories of noxiousness, triggers of conflict, and idioms for expressing otherwise unspoken or muted stories of dispossession. Smells imbue the social experience of places, becoming intimate reminiscences of social reproduction, shaping sensorial habits in the workplace. They are also experienced as painful symptoms of illness and toxicity.

Moving beyond the immediacy and spontaneity of sensory reactions, the paper argues for considering sensorial experience as a fertile ground to explore the sedimentation of controversial histories of socioecological change. It suggests bringing in conversation a possible sensorial political ecology with the Gramscian notion of common sense. Despite common sense often being understood as a “mindset”, this paper emphasizes its practical and corporeal dimensions, which invite us to address the political relevance of non-verbalized, implicit, naturalized sensorial experience as an (un)contested ground of socioecological injustice.