Marco Armiero
I am an environmental historian (with a PhD in Economic History), currently working as a the Director of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm. I am also a Senior Researcher at the National Research Council, Italy.
I am one of the founders of the environmental history field in Italy, authoring, among other works, the first Italian textbook on the subject.
My main topics of study have been environmental conflicts, uses of natural resources, politicization of nature and landscape, and the environmental effects of mass migrations. In English, I have published the book A Rugged Nation. Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy (2011). I have also published several articles and special issues in Environment and History, Left History, Radical History Review, and Capitalism Nature Socialism (where I am also one of the senior editors). I have also edited with Marcus Hall Nature and History in Modern Italy, with Lise Sedrez Environmentalism. Local Struggles, Global Histories, and Views from the South. Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World (19th -20th cent.).
Before moving to the KTH EHL I have been post-doctoral fellow and visiting scholar at Yale University, UC Berkeley, Stanford, the Autonomous University in Barcelona, and the Center for Social Sciences at the University of Coimbra, Portugal
I am one of the founders of the environmental history field in Italy, authoring, among other works, the first Italian textbook on the subject.
My main topics of study have been environmental conflicts, uses of natural resources, politicization of nature and landscape, and the environmental effects of mass migrations. In English, I have published the book A Rugged Nation. Mountains and the Making of Modern Italy (2011). I have also published several articles and special issues in Environment and History, Left History, Radical History Review, and Capitalism Nature Socialism (where I am also one of the senior editors). I have also edited with Marcus Hall Nature and History in Modern Italy, with Lise Sedrez Environmentalism. Local Struggles, Global Histories, and Views from the South. Environmental Stories from the Mediterranean World (19th -20th cent.).
Before moving to the KTH EHL I have been post-doctoral fellow and visiting scholar at Yale University, UC Berkeley, Stanford, the Autonomous University in Barcelona, and the Center for Social Sciences at the University of Coimbra, Portugal
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Books by Marco Armiero
Floods, water shortages, increasingly frequent and prolonged heatwaves, gated communities and immense slums -- those are the features of the cities in the age of climate change. But other things are also occurring in the cities such as measures for the reduction of private traffic, the blooming of urban gardens, and the multiplication of grassroots environmentalist organizations. These are some of the ways in which climate change materializes in the urban context.
Thanks to the Occupy Climate Change project! (OCC!), funded by the Swedish agency FORMAS, a team of researchers is analyzing how associations, activists, and municipal governments are tackling climate change challenges from the bottom-up.
To understand how younger generations experience present climate change and imagine the future, OCC! launches an imaginative exploration of our cities in 200 years. How will our cities be in the year 2200? It may be a dystopian reality, a paradise or a hyper-technological hell, or maybe it will be dominated by the return of wild nature or a completely new ecosystem with living beings that we do not know yet...
Our call for imaginative urban explorations is open to all people, and especially to high school and university students. We invite to imagine how either one’s own city or one of the five cities studied in the OCC! project (New York, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, Malmo, and Naples) will be in the year 2200.
Our project aims to create an atlas of future cities – Cities of Other Worlds –, which will offer an inventory of the urban fears, hopes, anxieties, and fantasies of young generations.
To participate, please send us:
(1) a short story (min. 1500 - max 5000 words), imagining either your city or one of the cities of the OCC! project (New York, Rio, Istanbul, Malmo, Naples) in the year 2200.
(2) a signed OCC! consent to publish form (it appears at the end of this booklet). You authorize us publish the short story in the OCC!’s Atlas of the Other Worlds (an online, open-access platform). Such a form includes a declaration attesting that the story is the result of the author’s ingenuity and that it is unpublished.
All the materials must be sent by email to the following address
ehlab@abe.kth.se no later than December 30, 2020.
those in power.
Building on my experience as a researcher working on the waste crisis in
Campania, the most densely populated region of Italy, and its capital Naples, in this chapter I will reflect on our own presence as radical scholars among activists. I will argue that the figure of the ghost might lend us a possibility to better understand the relation between theory- making and academic discourse on the one hand, and story- telling practices among activists and communities on the other.
Developing from this, I will suggest a difference between engaged researchers and militant researchers. At the end, I will close the chapter proposing that not science but alchemy is actually the leading approach of the new era; alchemy because the Anthropocene discourse reifies relationships and aims to change “the thing” rather than the relationships producing that very thing, whether climate change, the
Anthropocene or any other incarnation of environmental apocalypse.
Il testo è disponibile online al sito http://www.linariarete.org/wp/ambientalismi/
Floods, water shortages, increasingly frequent and prolonged heatwaves, gated communities and immense slums -- those are the features of the cities in the age of climate change. But other things are also occurring in the cities such as measures for the reduction of private traffic, the blooming of urban gardens, and the multiplication of grassroots environmentalist organizations. These are some of the ways in which climate change materializes in the urban context.
Thanks to the Occupy Climate Change project! (OCC!), funded by the Swedish agency FORMAS, a team of researchers is analyzing how associations, activists, and municipal governments are tackling climate change challenges from the bottom-up.
To understand how younger generations experience present climate change and imagine the future, OCC! launches an imaginative exploration of our cities in 200 years. How will our cities be in the year 2200? It may be a dystopian reality, a paradise or a hyper-technological hell, or maybe it will be dominated by the return of wild nature or a completely new ecosystem with living beings that we do not know yet...
Our call for imaginative urban explorations is open to all people, and especially to high school and university students. We invite to imagine how either one’s own city or one of the five cities studied in the OCC! project (New York, Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, Malmo, and Naples) will be in the year 2200.
Our project aims to create an atlas of future cities – Cities of Other Worlds –, which will offer an inventory of the urban fears, hopes, anxieties, and fantasies of young generations.
To participate, please send us:
(1) a short story (min. 1500 - max 5000 words), imagining either your city or one of the cities of the OCC! project (New York, Rio, Istanbul, Malmo, Naples) in the year 2200.
(2) a signed OCC! consent to publish form (it appears at the end of this booklet). You authorize us publish the short story in the OCC!’s Atlas of the Other Worlds (an online, open-access platform). Such a form includes a declaration attesting that the story is the result of the author’s ingenuity and that it is unpublished.
All the materials must be sent by email to the following address
ehlab@abe.kth.se no later than December 30, 2020.
those in power.
Building on my experience as a researcher working on the waste crisis in
Campania, the most densely populated region of Italy, and its capital Naples, in this chapter I will reflect on our own presence as radical scholars among activists. I will argue that the figure of the ghost might lend us a possibility to better understand the relation between theory- making and academic discourse on the one hand, and story- telling practices among activists and communities on the other.
Developing from this, I will suggest a difference between engaged researchers and militant researchers. At the end, I will close the chapter proposing that not science but alchemy is actually the leading approach of the new era; alchemy because the Anthropocene discourse reifies relationships and aims to change “the thing” rather than the relationships producing that very thing, whether climate change, the
Anthropocene or any other incarnation of environmental apocalypse.
Il testo è disponibile online al sito http://www.linariarete.org/wp/ambientalismi/
Mediterranean, borders cut through the increasingly integrated world
in a way that exposes the inside-outside logic of contemporary capitalism. All this happens on a backdrop where cities are becoming the key
sites of contestation since borders and levees do not suffice to keep
them intact. Cities are also increasingly becoming the focus of international efforts to deal with climate change and migration, where nationstates are falling short. By synthesizing the possibilities of urban belonging and right-to-the-world, we argue that new urban imaginaries are at
the frontline of the mobilities debate today. Consequently, we argue for
a cross-pollination of mobility justice and climate justice as urban citizenship. The main thrust of our argument is that there are viable alternatives
to the isolationist fortress nation model, which can bring a new dimension to debates concerning climate change and migration. Fearless cities
are but one example of these emerging alternatives. By focusing on the
opportunities for a radical response to climate change and migration, we
suggest that cities can respond to the burning mobility challenges of our
times with a just, grounded and egalitarian urban citizenship framed as
mobile commons.
through the project.
Today at 6 p.m. on www.unive.it/ehvenice (in Italian with English subtitles)
Photo: Centro di documentazione di storia locale di Marghera, Archivio operaio “Augusto Finzi”, «La crocifissione», lotta contro la nocività, Porto Marghera, 1973
Marco Armiero is an environmental historian (with a PhD in Economic History), currently working as a the Director of the KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm and Senior Researcher at the National Research Council, Italy.
Gilda Zazzara is a Researcher of Contemporary History at Ca’ Foscari Uni versity of Venice and member of the faculty of the new Master’s Degree Programme in Environmental Humanities.
nor the efficacy of the controversial incinerator;2
nevertheless, we believe that the story we will tell has something to say about the real contamination of Campania and maybe also raise a few doubts about the reasons for placing the incinerator in Acerra. Although we have chosen to adopt a storytelling approach, reclaiming the power of toxic biographies (Newman 2012
) in order to understand unequal socio-ecological configurations, we frame our narrative within Alaimo’s (2010
) transcorporeality theory, Nixon’s (2011
) theorization of slow violence (Nixon 2011
), and the rich scholarship on environmental justice activism, and more specifically on Pulido’s (1998
) subaltern environmentalism. Acerra’s tale of dioxin, sheep, and humans literally embodies the notion of transcoporeality, revealing the porosity of human/nonhuman ecologies. While we focus on the epiphany of this revelation, that is, the illness and death of Vincenzo, a shepherd from Acerra, we also appeal to Nixon’s slow violence, which allows us to place his contaminated body in an ecology of space and time, in which the accumulation of toxins mirrors the histories of exploitation of both humans and places. In conclusion of our narrative, we argue that the slow violence which killed Vincenzo and his sheep also had transformative power, contributing to uncovering the unjust distribution of environmental burdens and converting victims into activists. The transcorporeal circulation among sheep, humans, the grass, and the factory challenges the anthropocentrism usually inherent to environmental justice. While in this article we do not embrace the sheep’s perspective, we do believe that uncovering the bodily connections between human and nonhuman animals can lead to a quest for a more-than-human emancipatory project.
The school is meant for PhD students, but master students and post docs are welcome to apply.
A few travel grants are available for those who need support.
The school is part of the ITN Marie Curie program Enhance, Environmental Humanities for a Concerned Europe.
The call is here https://www.kth.se/en/abe/inst/philhist/historia/ehl/enhance-school-cfa, while more information about the school are available at http://enhanceitn.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/SchoolSchedule-Draft.pdf (more details soon).
In Europa questo genere di scrittura èquasi assente e comunque invisibile, nel senso che questi testi non hanno avuto abbastanza circolazione (magari autoprodotti o pubblicati con case editrici molto piccole).
Lo scopo di questo progetto èdi raccogliere i materiali giàprodotti e soprattutto stimolare la scrittura di “autobiografie tossiche”.
It is in Croatian. I am including here also a version mostly in Italian, with some parts in English
Les communautés affectées par la contamination toxique en Campanie, en Italie, ont dû faire face au défi de prouver un lien de causalité direct entre l'exposition aux polluants et les problèmes de santé, compte tenu d'une longue histoire de mauvaise gestion des déchets. Des études médicales ont été menées, mais le débat social et politique est statique. En septembre 2014, le ministère italien de la Santé a tout simplement répété des déclarations antérieures selon lesquelles les taux croissants de cancer en Campanie sont dus à de mauvaises habitudes de vie. L'article éclaire la politisation des corps malades de la Campanie. Nous analysons trois pratiques d'action politique et de résistance qui utilisaient la subjectivisation des corps physiques et des maladies pour exposer les injustices environnementales qui affectent les communautés. Dans le voisinage de Pianura, Naples, les gens ont rassemblé des dossiers médicaux comme preuve pour un procès en «épidémies coupables». Dans le pays de Fires, dans la périphérie nord de Naples, des centaines de cartes postales contenant des photos d'enfants tués par des pathologies rares ont été envoyées au chef de l'État italien et au pape. Enfin, dans la ville d'Acerra, le sang d'un berger mourant est devenu un objet politique pour prouver l'exposition à la contamination par les dioxines dans cette zone. La politisation des maladies et des corps confond le public et le privé, remet en question la production traditionnelle de connaissances et propose un récit alternatif pour les communautés et les individus touchés. Néanmoins, les pratiques de cette politisation ont divergé et ne sont pas toujours «politiques», comme nous le montrerons à travers les trois cas.
Las comunidades afectadas por la contaminación tóxica en Campania, Italia, han tenido que enfrentar el reto de demostrar una relación causal directa entre la exposición a los contaminantes y problemas de salud, dada una larga historia de mala gestión de residuos. Aunque se han realizado estudios médicos, el debate social y político ha estado estático. En septiembre de 2014, el Ministerio de Sanidad italiano se limitó a repetir declaraciones anteriores de que el aumento de las tasas de cáncer de Campania es debido a los malos costumbres de vida. El artículo arroja luz sobre la politización de los cuerpos enfermos de Campania. Se analizan tres prácticas de acción política y resistencia que emplearon la subjetivación de cuerpos físicos y de enfermedades para exponer la injusticia ambiental que afecta a las comunidades. En el barrio de Pianura, Nápoles, la gente ha recolectado los registros médicos como prueba para un ensayo en ‘epidemias culpables’. En la llamada Tierra de los Fuegos, en la periferia norte de Nápoles, cientos de postales con imágenes de niños muertos por patologías raras fueron enviados al Jefe de Estado italiano y el Papa. Por último, en el municipio de Acerra, la sangre de un pastor agonizante se convirtió en un objeto político para demostrar la exposición a la contaminación por dioxinas en esa zona. La politización de la enfermedad y los cuerpos mezcla lo público con lo privado, se opone a la producción de conocimiento convencional, y propone una narrativa alternativa para las comunidades y los individuos afectados. Sin embargo, las prácticas de este politización han sido bastante diferente y no siempre políticas, como se verá a través de los tres casos.
autumn that it brings. May represents a seasonal transition between
the rainy and dry seasons, and the mornings present a dull cloudiness
that covers the valleys and the veredas. As the skies clear, lush
meadow grasses emerge along with the pink flowering Paineira-Rosa
(Ceiba pubiflora), a tree of the Malvaceae family, known in Goias as
barriguda (big belly) due to the swollen shape of its lower trunk.2 The
mild and pleasant freshness of autumn in the highlands of central
Brazil has long been an invitation for people to go out, invading the
bars, restaurants, and squares of the region’s cities. Impressive is the
indescribable blue that curtains the firmaments, as sung in M^es de
Maio, a well-known standard of Brazilian country music: “Blue sky
has shone / Month of May has finally arrived / Eyes will open up to so
much color / It is May, and life has its splendor.”3 But this year, rather
than life and splendor, the heralds of May announced the tragic arrival of the grim reaper, wearing the black cloak of misfortune.