Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
- Convenors:
-
Marco Armiero
Anupama Mohan (Indian Institute of Technology Jodhpur)
Camelia Dewan (Uppsala University)
Send message to Convenors
- Formats:
- Workshop
- Streams:
- Decolonizing Environmental Pasts
- Location:
- Room 6
- Sessions:
- Friday 23 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Narratives can be powerful tools of oppression and liberation. This workshop assumes that there is a toxic narrative infrastructure that silences, normalizes, and invisibilizes injustices. Guerrilla narrative is the assemblage of practices aiming to sabotage it while proposing alternative stories.
Long Abstract:
We envision this workshop as an informal space where to share guerrilla narrative experiences. Armiero et al. (2019) have started talking about guerrilla narrative as the ensemble of practices aiming to sabotage “toxic narratives”, that is, the rhetoric device operationalized to normalizes or invisibilzies injustices. First of all, guerrilla narrative implies to recognize the toxic narrative infrastructure in which we are immersed without even noticing it. It means to nurture the art of noticing, of escaping from the trick of naturalization and normalization. Where are the toxic narratives around and within us? Which exercises can we – as scholars and teachers -- implement to notice them? However, for us guerrilla narrative is not simply the unheard story of oppression reclaimed from the memory dump; rather, guerrilla narrative is the practice of reimagining subaltern stories, storying them, and making collective identities. If it is true that the first step to crush a community is to take its history away (Klein et al., 2009), regaining control of the ways of remembering and storytelling is first and foremost an act of sabotage. Can guerrilla narrative be a research methodology? And in which relationships with oral history, for instance? We summon the many who have been practicing guerrilla narrative in their own terms. We wish to learn from each other experiences and practices with the conviction that we do not need any formalized methodologies but rather a community of practices committed to sabotage toxic narratives wherever they are, from the classroom to the archive.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Friday 23 August, 2024, -Contribution short abstract:
In Cuba there is an ongoing narrative supported by national media transmitting the socialist idea of an egalitarian society.But this is not really reflecting the reality of things: there are tons of contradictions and economic inequalities.How do people react to this and build their own narrative?
Contribution long abstract:
Cuba, a socialist state since more than 60 years, has its own toxic narratives as well. People are continuously repeated - through television as well as the radio or public advertisement on the streets - the nice and distorted story of a government that cares for its people and for socialist ideals. But actually, seen their total detachment from contemporary reality, such slogans sound ridiculous to the majority of Cubans. There is another, parallel narrative that highlights the necessity, for Cubans, to luchar (fight) in order to inventar (invent) ways of sobrevivir (survive). Inventar refers both to the act of increasing one’s life conditions, often through the black market, and of being creative in the reparation and ideation of objects. In both acceptations, it stresses Cubans’ incredible capacity to find solutions to problems. In the first acceptation, it has a specific bound to morality: to steal and resell in the black market is accepted because a necessary mean to survive, but only to the extent that it allows also others to do the same. “Dejar vivir el otro” (letting the other live as well) is a moral principle, supported by a deep reciprocal comprehension of the need to survive. Analysing the context of the waste economy in Havana, characterised by informal flows of various materials and objects, I will show how, acting at the margins of governmental ruling, it represents - because of its being disobedient and densely governed by inventos of both kinds - a guerrilla narrative sui generis.
Contribution short abstract:
In this workshop I will present an initial process of community-based wetland management along the Simeto river, in Sicily, Italy, that challenges top-down projects of nature conservation as much as hegemonic toxic narratives of ‘improvement’.
Contribution long abstract:
In the last two centuries, wetlands and riverine environments, have undergone a systematic campaign of denigration resulting from a cultural prejudice that have privileged, as being more civilised, agriculture over other productive activities. Accordingly, state ambitions of driving political, economic, and ecological progress by disciplining environments and their inhabitants resulted in transforming wetlands and rivers into objects of political mastery, economic exploitation, and scientific scrutiny. These processes have been framed within a ‘toxic narrative infrastructure’ of ‘improvement’ encapsulated in the Italian term ‘bonifica’ (reclamation). Far from turning rivers and wetlands into ‘good’, such an approach resulted in creating wastelands inhabited by wasted beings, redundant to state-led projects of ‘modernisation’, hence expendable on the altar of the ‘bonifica’. In the last fifty years wetlands and rivers have been reterritorialized as global actors to fight the effects of socioecological crisis and climate change with the result of detaching these environments from their historical, social, and economic context, and thus exacerbating their degradation and loss.
Premising on this assumption, this contribution discusses early research findings from the Horizon Europe research project ‘BioTraces’: Biodiversity and Transformative Change for plural and nature positive societies". Particularly, I present an initial process of community-based wetland management along the Simeto river in Sicily, Italy, that challenges top-down projects of nature conservation as much as hegemonic toxic narratives of ‘improvement’.
Contribution short abstract:
Domination and exploitation arise as different and sequential critical focuses in feminist Western canon. The talk will take the perspective of valorization to investigate the interplay of the discursive and economic dimensions.
Contribution long abstract:
Between the 1970s and 1980s, there is a tension between feminisms that emphasise power relationships and/or discursive orders to highlight a woman's specific place in production and those that emphasise power relationships and/or discursive orders to define her social and cultural position. The relevance of this debate and its political options to contemporary analysis stems from the shift towards the productivity of reproductive activities, which changes both the concept of labour and the resulting forms of exploitation, as well as the dimensions on which transformation and liberation operate. Assuming the valorisation perspective delineates a dynamic field that fosters the interaction between these two tendencies: it is only through relational and linguistic work of self-consciousness that it is possible to grasp the conditions of exploitation; and together, only by putting the actual material conditions of life into words can analysis have transforming force.
Contribution short abstract:
"Between Chronos & Kairos" is a method of AI-assisted participatory storytelling that interrogates the exploitative sourcing practices of minerals for the green energy transition. The result is a wall of images along branching timelines visualizing stories towards more promising, just futures.
Contribution long abstract:
In researching “the dark side of green”–the many hidden externalities, contradictions, and exploitations behind the material sourcing of the green energy transition–one is left to wonder: If the nickel, lithium, and cobalt needed for zero-emission technologies frequently results in environmental degradation, child labor, and indigenous dispossession, are we to just throw up our arms and brace ourselves for planetary climate collapse?
Between Chronos and Kairos picks up the threads–the many, splitting, tentacled, often fraying threads–where the research of existing conditions leaves off. In employing artificial intelligence (AI) in the generation of images and ideation of narratives through textual prompts around critical mineral mining, indigeneity, and ecological systems, collective storytelling can challenge systems perpetuating the status quo. The future can be just, beautiful, and based in socio-ecological reciprocity. A roadmap of branching trajectories and possibilities is thus co-created by material author and AI assistant. AI computation is both tool and method to uniquely interrogate multivalent interpretations of time (from linear sequence to narrative to opportune moment) for the purposes of mapping future directions and materializing desirable futures. Such a visual collaboration enables rapid iteration of timelines and physical presentation to engage with as a group. The participatory workshop format ultimately results in a wall of images along branching timelines that visualize stories towards a better future, a powerful tool in activist praxis.
Contribution short abstract:
“Flegrea – a future for Bagnoli” is a documentary dedicated to the Neapolitan district of Bagnoli, investigating the influence of the history of pollution and exploitation suffered by the district on the new generations. The documentary is mainly realized by activists of the local social movements.
Contribution long abstract:
Bagnoli, a district in the western periphery of Naples, still suffers from the environmental impacts caused by the Italsider steel industry, closed since 1992, and by the high unemployment rates caused by the shutdown. A strong social movement emerged in the district during the last decade advocating for environmental cleanup, democratization of local politics and defense of the commons. Like the whole Southern Italy, Bagnoli has been historically portrayed as a backward territory, which could only be modernized by external interventions. Such depictions supported both the application of special laws for its industrialization and the appointment of unaccountable state commissioners to carry out the environmental cleanup. In response to the hegemony of such derogatory external narratives, narrating the district’s history from within acquires a particular political value. We present the example of "Flegrea – A future for Bagnoli", a documentary mainly conceived and directed by people involved in the social movements of Naples. The film explores the relationship between young Bagnoli residents and the abandoned steel industry, revealing the profound impact of this polluted site on the lives of the new generations. The film is played by the inhabitants themselves and, throughout the documentary, the young protagonists engage in discussions with local collectives and grassroots organizations, which collaborated in the film's production. The documentary successfully presents a backgrounded narrative of Naples—a story of marginalization but also resistance and hope, that the inhabitants of Bagnoli can feel as their own.
Contribution short abstract:
Workers' buyouts engage with the Wastocene by countering the reproduction of 'wasting relationships.' Some Italian cases are particularly useful for discussing how their narratives contribute to the de-commodification of labor and the proliferation of 'commoning relationships' at the workplace level
Contribution long abstract:
In recent decades, recovered enterprises have gained momentum as a response to both economic, social and environmental challenges, representing an intersection of economic viability, heightened worker consciousness and environmental stewardship.
The so-called workers' buyouts, carried out by employees of companies in crisis to reclaim ownership of their workplaces and transform them into cooperative entities, take on a specific connotation within the interpretative framework of the Wastocene. They involve disengaging labor from the proliferation and reproduction of 'wasting relationships.' Conversely, within a recovered enterprise, one can observe the regeneration of 'commoning relationships,' based on a delicate balance between revitalized labor and industrial relations, new ideological premises for company management and the imperative to navigate market dynamics.
By analyzing pivotal case studies emerging from the thriving Italian landscape, this contribution explores how these experiences navigate between business resilience and eco-consciousness. It sheds light on their narrative framing and communication strategies that shape public perception and socio-political significance.
Furthermore, this contribution aims to situate the debate on recovered enterprises and sustainable business models within the broader framework of the 'just transition,' addressing the urgent need for the de-commodification of labor.
Contribution short abstract:
Hydrogen is depicted as the environment-friendly method for electricity production. Following a plan to build a hydrogen plant in an indigeouns area of French Guyana, a clash occurred between the local people and building firms, also in terms of opposing narratives of progerss and preservation.
Contribution long abstract:
In recent years, hydrogen has become of the renewable energy industry’s favorite buzzwords. It is often depicted as the environment-friendly techno-fix that will make electricity generated from solar and wind power storable and tradable on world markets. That techno-optimistic vision clashes with on-ground reality. In 2020, three French companies conceived plans for the world's largest solar-hydrogen power plant in northwest French Guyana. The Electric Plant of West Guyana promised to save CO2 emissions while ending recurrent outages for 70,000 Guyanese. Local customary chiefs belonging to the indigenous Kali’na people rejected the project from the outset. Local authorities criticized the imposed notion of hasty and lucrative development based on gigantic infrastructures, which they see as a form of ‘eco-colonialism’. While the Kali’na people are also resorting to juridical arguments to fight against the plant, they principally oppose the vision of their territory as no one’s land, propagated by the industrial environment, and instead defend an alternative vision based on “a certain form of slowness and modesty”. Based on fieldwork, I have examined this socio-environmental conflict through the prism of decolonial energy justice and discursive analysis. I have integrated the analysis of energy justice with an examination of the valuation languages of project proponents and detractors to highlight the idiosyncratic worldviews that underlie these languages. I then conducted a semantic analysis of a corpus of media and interviews collected and extracted several themes, which I classified as belonging to different languages of valuation.
Contribution short abstract:
This paper critically examines climate reductive translations of floods in Bangladesh and suggests that they act as a toxic narrative infrastructure that silences and makes invisible how flood-protection embankments worsen environmental degradation and exacerbates socio-ecological injustices.
Contribution long abstract:
This paper critically examines climate reductive translations of floods in Bangladesh and suggests that they act as a toxic narrative infrastructure that silences and makes invisible how flood-protection embankments, now proposed as adaptation solutions for a drowning Bangladesh, worsen environmental degradation and exacerbates socio-ecological injustices. By drawing on archival research and oral histories, this paper constructs a guerrilla narrative that proposes alternative stories to highlight the complexities of water abundance, water scarcity and water salinity - that are risked being lost when lumped together as 'floods'.
Contribution short abstract:
This contribution aims to examine - through Environmental Humanities and Political Ecology - the Italian environmental injustice case of Porto Marghera and Gabriele Bortolozzo's legacy as a worker who exposed harm, leaving a lasting wound for modern Venetians.
Contribution long abstract:
In the introduction to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, in 1994 Al Gore wrote that the merit of the American biologist was that she warned the entire nation of a danger that no one saw – a threat to the entire planet. The biography of our species is studded with multiple episodes of threats, sometimes visible, such as contamination, intoxication, and death, others invisible, such as those rooted in the political world, more challenging to detect and eradicate. The business world, in fact, has often had different interests from those of communities. And yet, there are many events in which initially ignored risks have then emerged in the eyes of all.
With reference to those two different dimensions - one visible, the other apparently invisible – I will attempt to use the methodological tools provided by the Environmental Humanities and Political Ecology in analysing a case of Italian environmental injustice: Porto Marghera and the Venetian lagoon. In particular, after briefly retracing the main stages of the development of the industrial site, I will narrate – through different types of sources (graphic novel, short film, etc.) –, the biography of Gabriele Bortolozzo, the worker who first denounced the VCM (chloride vinyl monomer) plants’ harmfulness and initiated the lawsuit against the Montedison and Enichem managers. What legacy has Bortolozzo left to Venetian environmentalism? For those who live in Venice nowadays, what is the deepest wound linked to the past vicissitudes of Porto Marghera?
Contribution short abstract:
Film narratives about nature are rooted in a long tradition of worldviews where it cannot escape a condition of object of concern for human scrutiny, taming and consumption. This paper examines how audiovisual content navigates (and has navigated) such dominant toxic narrative infrastructure.
Contribution long abstract:
Arguably, film is one of the most influential forms that human communities have created to build and look at themselves. Thus, it is unsurprisingly rich in conceptualizations of the environment, in narratives about nature. For instance, in the past few decades, we have become increasingly familiar with apocalyptic tales concerning multiple human ways of relating to the environment, broadly understood, and their subsequent destructive effects. But these narratives, however well-meant they might be, are unequivocally rooted in a long tradition of representations and worldviews that precede and overlap the history of film itself as well as the current growing sense of looming environmental catastrophe. Often in these narratives, nature cannot escape a condition of object of concern for scientific scrutiny, technological taming, political-economic management, socio-cultural commodification and, in the end, all-round consumption.
Through a few illustrative examples and combining perspectives from film and screen studies and environmental humanities, this paper will explore a range of film, televisual and wider audiovisual narratives which, in many ways, have tried to offer alternative stories and/or, at least, question the dominant views about nature. We will therefore examine to what extent it has been and/or is feasible, through films, or better nowadays, audiovisual content, to overcome the dominant and long-lasting toxic communication infrastructure that, from the abovementioned approach, ends up silencing, normalizing, and/or invisibilizing (socio-ecological) injustices.
Contribution short abstract:
Europe's enthusiastic narrative of a recycling-focused and technology-driven circular economy (CE) risks silencing both scholars striving to address current CE limits and the knowledge hoarded by already existing circular initiatives. What can these dissident voices teach us about circularity?
Contribution long abstract:
Over the last ten years, the circular economy (CE) has grown exponentially in Europe, gaining enough traction in the public sphere to establish itself as not just one theory among others, but the alternative for a sustainable future.
Parallel to the surging enthusiasm with which many EU member states have embraced the CE, researchers have highlighted theoretical and practical gaps in the current paradigm. The spread of the CE concepts combined with blind-optimism rhetoric seems to conceal some fundamental issues related to social justice (Berry 2021), research analysis (Schultz 2019) and entropic impossibilities (Lehmann 2023). The EU CE paradigm, with its focus on efficiency and recycling, seems more like a conceptual continuation of the linear production system rather than a break with it (Appelgren 2020).
This is not only a theoretical concern as collective efforts toward a unique CE are affecting the already existing circular economies. What can these smaller realities teach us about circularity? From which dangers those dissident voices are warning us? How can we resist the oversimplification narrative this paradigm is undergoing?
The case of the Italian voluntary association ReSo is an interesting starting point for answering these questions. Based in a country that's leading the way in the realm of circular initiatives, especially in recycling, ReSo combines the distribution of package-damaged food with a powerful community-grounded network. The story of its decline from a perceived paragon of European zero-waste praxis to near dissolution illustrates both the advantages and disadvantages of putting people first in circular initiatives.
Contribution short abstract:
This talk focuses on environmental storytelling in sites dominated by extraction, toxicity, and industrial storytelling. It follows diverse urban narrative ensembles that resist necrotic industrial plots and aim to repair the broken narrative ecosystem through collective narrative acts.
Contribution long abstract:
This talk addresses the challenges of environmental storytelling work in the urban spaces of Global North and “high Nordic” colonialism and extractivism in the US and Europe, dominated by “story factories” and platforms for industrial storytelling. Drawing on the work of AbduMalique Simone, who recognizes that “people are [vital urban] infrastructure,” this talk follow instead diverse urban footsteps and their narrative footprints in Binghamton, Trondheim, and Tampere, exploring how collective and site-specific narrative practices resist necrotic industrial plots and aim to repair the broken narrative ecosystem. The talk will meander across several narrative situations that challenge “aesthetic austerity” and its reductive genres of public storytelling, centering on several emancipatory environmental acts: maps and archives of grassroots narratives in Hiedanranta, Finland; trans-Atlantic speculative work and ‘wave’ writing experiments in Trondheim and Binghamton; and, Søstrene Suse’s Radiokino listening repair sessions across Scandinavia. The talk will conclude with a reflection on the practices of narrative ‘repair’.
Contribution short abstract:
In Milan, dominant narratives frame urban greening as an environmental compensation strategy, neglecting issues of care, distribution and accessibility of green spaces. In contrast, IPV’s guerrilla community garden builds on these aspects, offering an alternative experience of nature in the city.
Contribution long abstract:
The growing interest of policymakers in urban greening, forestry and re-naturalization is setting political agendas and driving investment in the global city market, making it imperative for scholars to adopt a critical perspective. Current dominant policy narratives frame urban greening as an environmental compensation strategy producing widespread benefits for all. Overlooking possible unjust outcomes of greening interventions, and neglecting issues of accessibility, use, property and distribution, this a-critical and consensual approach seems to focus more on the aesthetic and moral power of “greening” as a symbol than on its actual contribution to urban livability and sustainability. Moreover, by pursuing automation, performance efficiency and process control, thus promoting an engineered, universal and de-spatialized image of urban greening, immune to the socio-cultural specificities of the user community, they mislead the relational and ecological dimensions of plants and trees. Conversely, insurgent greening experiences arise from the recognition of the agency of urban nature in the (personal and collective) experience of the city. Embodying the concepts of collective care, cohabitation and inclusion, guerrilla practices drive counter-narratives that shift the focus to human-nature relations and truly incorporate the scientific literature on biophilia and the benefits of nature. By comparing the experiences, perceptions and uses of two green spaces in Isola, a gentrified Milan neighborhood –the Library of Trees, the eco-symbol of the large real estate operation “Porta Nuova”, and the guerrilla community garden Isola Pepe Verde, this paper shows how guerrilla narratives open up new equitable and community-based pathways for the renaturalization of cities.