Seminar: "Prefiguring Grassroots Urban Politics with the Future Archive Method", by Ilenia Iengo

Ilenia Iengo, PhD fellow at ICTA-UAB will be giving the seminar “Prefiguring Grassroots Urban Politics with the Future Archive Method. The lived, dreamed, conspired relations between environmental justice and transfeminism in Naples, Italy”.  

 

Title: “Prefiguring Grassroots Urban Politics with the Future Archive Method. The lived, dreamed, conspired relations between environmental justice and transfeminism in Naples, Italy”

Speaker: Ilenia Iengo, PhD fellow at ICTA-UAB
 

Date: Wednesday, October 26^th, 2022
Time: 12h
Venue: Sala Antoni Rosell (Z/022 – Z/023) ICTA-UAB and Zoom. Registration here or in the QR code include in the poster.

Description of the seminar

Following Walidah Imarisha’s words: “We can’t build what we can’t imagine, all organizing is science fiction” (2018) this project aims to open a space for reflection and imagination about the city from the positionalities and desires of grassroots activists at the intersection of transfeminism and environmental justice in the southern Italian city of Naples through an investigation over the subjective and collective transformative imaginaries. Using the Future Archive Method designed by the militant researcher Manuela Zechner (2014), the paper invites fellow activists to engage in a speculative exercise that will focus on coalition and prefigurative grassroots politics, making space for imaginaries and desires of, with and about the future city. I decided to dedicate my attention, energy and time to a social science fiction project centered on the exercises of desiring and engaging in the production of new imaginaries, thereby opening the way for alternative presents and more just futures. The emergent cartography of desires will not intend to be prescriptive nor exhaustive, rather it proposes a contingent and affective map of prefigurative urban praxis. The project aspires to produce knowledge that could be of use and accessible to the communities involved. The interviews can be used for collective workshop reflections on aspirations and intentions for the future, for podcasts and art installation. The project will focus on continuity and affirmative imaginaries for desirable futures or counter-futures beyond what is probable, to undo the inevitability of injustices while subverting normative visions of the city.

 

Description of the researcher

Ilenia is a scholar-activist Ph.D. fellow of the Feminist Political Ecology WEGO ITN network at ICTA- UAB and BCNUEJ. She holds a Bachelor Degree in International Relations from the University L’Orientale of Naples, and a Masters Degree in International Environmental Studies from The Norwegian University of Life Sciences. She worked as co-coordinator of the Public Environmental Humanities Project Toxic Bios: a guerrilla narrative mapping contamination, illness, and resistance for emancipatory storytelling at EHL KTH in Stockholm. She is a member of the Undisciplined Environments collective and Ecologie Politiche del Presente laboratory. Her action-research doctoral project engages with coalition and prefigurative politics at the intersection of environmental justice and transfeminism for emancipatory life in the southern Italian city of Naples.

Her latest publication is: "Iengo, I. (2022). Endometriosis and Environmental Violence: An Embodied, Situated Ecopolitics from the Land of Fires in Campania, Italy. Environmental Humanities, 14(2), 341-360.

 

About the BCNUEJ Seminar Series

Launched in October 2020, the BCNUEJ Seminar Series aims to provide PhD students the opportunity to present their work while also providing a forum for discussion on environmental justice and sustainability topics. Each seminar is free and open to the public, with the goal of appealing to our broader ICTA communities and beyond. Seminars are held every three weeks and also feature guest speakers from outside our institutions. To enable colleagues from other countries to participate, most seminars are hybrid events.