Intergenerational narratives of toxicity: understanding heterogeneity and care in a polluted steeltown (Taranto, Italy)
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: This article examines environmental narratives amidst chronic industrial pollution across three generations in Taranto, Italy. Drawing on ethnographic research with residents positioned in different historical periods, we show how each generation's understanding of toxicity is intimately tied to shifting economic conditions, political interventions, and embodied experiences in Taranto's polluted landscape. The first generation, closely tied to state-led industrial development, recalls their experience of pride and modernity. The second generation is faced with growing scientific evidence on industrial pollution and institutional scrutiny: they make sense of toxicity by questioning the promise of prosperity that the industrial development and resulting modernity offered. The youngest generation, who grew amid persistent environmental degradation, creates a narrative of pollution as a given dimension of everyday life and one that calls forth community cohesion. By highlighting these intergenerational narratives and their ongoing renegotiations, we shed light on how wellbeing and care are assembled, reworked, and contested over time. In doing so, this paper contributes to more heterogeneous understandings of environmental justice and the ways communities live through, and make sense of, industrial harm.
Source: BioSocieties
Institutions: University of Oxford, Libera Università Maria SS. Assunta
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
Estimated APC paid: $2,990
Awards: G1474659881, Global Environmental (in)Activism: a Multi-sited Ethnography of Industrial Pollution, Illness and Community Resistance in Italy and Taiwan, G5789214757, Organizing an Intersectional Feminist Movement: The International Women and Health Meetings (1977-2005), Whose health matters? Revealing environmental inequalities through residents’ experiences in polluted environments (Taranto, Italy)
OpenAlex ID: W4413484988