Marco Armiero’s research while affiliated with Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies and other places

This article aims to frame the state violence and socio-ecological injustice perpetrated against prisoners through the lens of both critical environmental justice studies and the concept of the Wasteocene. We seek to uncover the socio-ecological relationships that have historically shaped the enforcement of the prison and waste systems through a focus on the Italian context during the Covid-19 pandemic. We explore the case of a jail in Campania, a region in the South of Italy infamous for its troubled waste management that has caused uncountable and entangled health, social, and economic harms. The jail is adjacent to an area with a long history of waste disposal practices and numerous legal conflicts and corruption scandals: all characteristics that make this case emblematic of the broader problem of carceral environmental injustice. We argue that carceral institutions are generative sites for examining the dynamics of violence, expendability, and wasting relationships that are built into their structures and core functions We also maintain that the Covid-19 pandemic has both uncovered and exacerbated such dynamics and therefore stands as a framing device that further corroborates our argument. We conclude with lessons and observations for scholars studying environmental concerns and carceral systems through a multidisciplinary lens.

The environmental humanities is a dynamic and growing field of scholarly inquiry that grapples with many of the key challenges of our time. Over the past decade, in particular, the field has developed a strong emphasis on public-facing scholarship. However, while that public scholarship has grown steadily, scholarly analysis and reflection on this work has not kept pace. This article offers a timely discussion of the public environmental humanities as a field of engaged, experimental research practice. It explores how, where, and when this area of scholarship began to emerge and the diverse goals, formats, and modes of public engagement that are developing; and it provides an overview of some of the key challenges and opportunities in this space.

From the social uprisings in Santiago de Chile to the radical municipalism experiments in Naples, this volume takes the reader on an intellectual journey at the frontlines across global South and global North where climate breakdown meets social innovations. While the effects of the climate crisis are becoming more extreme and tangible across the globe with every passing day, urban social movements and their radical strategies to resist climate injustice often remain concealed from sight. Contributors to this volume ask how would it be to look at the politics of urban loss-and-damage not from the highly securitized zones of climate summits, but from favelas in Rio de Janeiro, flood-prone communities in São Paulo, urban gardens in Naples, or neighborhoods resisting climate gentrification in New York City? This book explores diverse worlds and praxis of urban social movements resisting the rising tides of climate crisis and social injustice.

From the social uprisings in Santiago de Chile to the radical municipalism experiments in Naples, this volume takes the reader on an intellectual journey at the frontlines across global South and global North where climate breakdown meets social innovations. While the effects of the climate crisis are becoming more extreme and tangible across the globe with every passing day, urban social movements and their radical strategies to resist climate injustice often remain concealed from sight. Contributors to this volume ask how would it be to look at the politics of urban loss-and-damage not from the highly securitized zones of climate summits, but from favelas in Rio de Janeiro, flood-prone communities in São Paulo, urban gardens in Naples, or neighborhoods resisting climate gentrification in New York City? This book explores diverse worlds and praxis of urban social movements resisting the rising tides of climate crisis and social injustice.

This introduction presents the Occupy Climate Change! research project, the root from which this volume has sprouted. Armiero, De Rosa and Turhan discuss the main themes addressed by the project and the contributors to the volume: the (counter-)power of community led experiments, the trap of the mainstream climate change discourses and policies, and the need to repoliticizing climate adaptation and mitigation. Facing loss and damage now and not in a remote future, communities are experimenting with a wide variety of social innovations, often deeply antagonistic to top-down approaches, sometimes more inclined towards collaborations with institutions. This introduction attempts to systematize the characteristics of social innovations vs. market innovations, though, avoiding to propose any fixed canon to evaluate grassroots experiments.

This chapter explores the connections between work, nature, and contamination under racial capitalism in the colonies. The aim is to show, through an empirical detailed case study, how environmental history can engage with the history of racial and class oppression focusing on subaltern bodies and their entanglement with power within toxic workplaces. The colonial extractivist system is a perfect laboratory for such an experiment in environmental history. The chapter focuses on gold extraction in the colony of Southern Rhodesia by white settler mining companies from the 1890s to the 1940s. Due to the low quality of the mineral, from around 1900 the colonial gold mining industry adopted the cyanide process to treat low-grade refractory ores. This chapter examines how the use of cyanidation technology chemicalised landscapes and generated racialised chemical exposure. That historical case is a telling example of silent chemical violence and toxic extractivism. Theoretically, it relates to the concepts of slow violence, trans-corporeality, and Wasteocene, while articulating with multidisciplinary research on environmental justice, working-class environmentalism, and labour and the environment. The chapter uses archival material from the National Archives of Zimbabwe, newspaper articles, and secondary literature.

Title: La natura del duce. Una storia ambientale del fascismo Place: Torino Publisher: Einaudi Year: 2022 ISBN: 9788806225049 URL: link to the title REVIEWER Simona Boscani Leoni-Université de Lausanne Citation S. Boscani Leoni, review of Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo, Wilko Graf von Hardenberg, La natura del duce. Una storia ambientale del fascismo, Torino, Einaudi, 2022, in: ARO, VI, 2023, 3, URL https://aro-isig.fbk.eu/issues/2023/3/la-natura-del-duce-simona-boscani-leoni/ Il libro analizza le ecologie politiche del fascismo, cioè le pratiche e i discorsi attraverso cui è stata percepita, costruita, trasformata la natura (o meglio, le nature) in funzione delle necessità ideologiche del regime fascista. Fin dall'introduzione, gli autori mettono in evidenza le sostanziali differenze dell'approccio fascista alla natura rispetto alle culture e ai movimenti ambientalisti del dopoguerra. Tale approccio si contraddistingue dalla volontà aggressiva, di supremazia e d'addomesticazione nei confronti della natura e delle popolazioni (in Italia e nelle colonie) come viene mostrato nella rigorosa analisi condotta nei sei capitoli dell'opera.[1] Il primo capitolo Il Duce e la natura fascista si concentra, dapprima, sul rapporto tra Mussolini e la natura così come descritto in due biografie redatte da due donne che ebbero un ruolo centrale nella sua vita: Margherita Sarfatti e la moglie Rachele. Quella di Scarfatti, pubblicata in inglese a Londra nel 1925, descrive un Duce in ascesa, un esempio di vera razza italiana romagnola, primitiva e feconda, un maschio dotato di una natura leonina. Anche le montagne (il Friuli, le Alpi carniche) assumono un ruolo centrale nella costruzione dell'immagine del Duce, diventando parte integrante del mito fascista della ruralità contrapposta alla mollezza intellettuale e cittadina. La seconda biografia in questione, quella di Rachele Mussolini, venne pubblicata nel 1948 a Milano. In questo caso (siamo già nel dopoguerra) l'autrice sottolinea soprattutto il rapporto del marito con gli animali addomesticati: cani, gatti, cavalli e cerca di trasmettere un'immagine intima e innocua del fascismo. La natura è anche presente nei discorsi di Mussolini, a cui è consacrata la seconda parte del capitolo. Il Duce insisteva spesso sulla necessità del lavoro umano (supportato dalla