Title: “Re-politicizing the economy: working-class environmentalism and the future of mono-industrial towns” by Stefania Barca

Title: “Re-politicizing the economy: working-class environmentalism and the future of mono-industrial towns”

Speaker: Stefania Barca





Date: Friday, 22nd February 2019

Time: 12 to 14 h

Venue: Z/023 Espai Montseny 

This talk will offers a theorization of working-class ecology as the place where industrial communities live and work, being typically affected by environmental injustice, and of working-class environmentalism as those forms of activism that link labour and environmental struggles for the defense of reproduction. Focusing on monoindustrial towns, I describe environmental injustice as the result of both sexual and colonial divisions of labor on the local scale, as reflected by the “job blackmail”, and look at environmental justice activism as a possibility for re-politicizing “the economy”. The paper’s theoretical section draws on a social ethnography of working-class ecology in the case of Taranto, a mono-industrial town in southern Italy, which is experiencing wide social mobilizations for rethinking the relationship between production, reproduction and ecology on the local scale, spurred by a severe environmental and public-health crisis. It shows how environmental justice activism since the early 2000s has allowed the re-framing of union politics along new ways of politicizing the local economy.



Stefania Barca (Naples 1968) is senior researcher at the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra (CES/UC). She obtained her PhD in Economic History from the University of Bari (Italy) in 1997 and holds the title of associate professor in Modern History and in Economic History (by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research - MIUR). She has been vice-president of CES scientific board, co-director of the PhD program 'Democracy in the 21st century' (2012-15), coordinator of the research group on Social Policies, Labor and Inequalities (2010-14). She currently coordinates a graduate seminar on Ecological Crisis and Democracy and lectures in Political Ecology at CES/UC. She was visiting scholar at the Program in Agrarian Studies of Yale University (2005-06), and 'Ciriacy Wantrup' postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley (2006-08); she has been Guest Researcher at the Pufendorf Institute for Advanced Studies of Lund University in 2015-16. She has served as vice-president of the European Society for Environmental History (ESEH) between 2011 and 2013, and now serves as member of the editorial board of the journal Environmental History.



She has published articles in national and international journals in the fields of Economic History, Environmental History, Ecological Economics, and Political Ecology and is the author of two books and co-author of a textbook on environmental history. Her Enclosing Water. Nature and Political Economy in a Mediterranean Valley (Cambridge, UK: White Horse Press 2010), was awarded the Turku Book Prize in 2011. Her current research interests cover the environmental impact of industry in the Anthropocene, the relationship between labor and the environment, environmental justice, degrowth and commoning.