Global Environmental (in)Activism: a Multi-sited Ethnography of Industrial Pollution, Illness and Community Resistance in Italy and Taiwan (360G-Wellcome-217775_Z_19_Z)

The research proposed is a multi-sited ethnographic investigation into the relationship between industrial pollution as a health threat and the ongoing social, political, and moral struggle of two communities living in close proximity to polluting sites. Through a comparative study of the people of Taranto, Italy, and Tainan, Taiwan, this project seeks to explore the political dimensions of environmental health degradation and exposure by conceiving pollution as a complex symbolic configuration assembled at the crossroads of historical, scientific, legal, and interpersonal trajectories. Understanding how these communities make sense of their polluted worlds is fundamental in order to grasp their political aspirations and their self-collocation within local and global narratives of environmentalism. This project expands and builds on Anna Lora-Wainwright's (2017) notion of resigned activism and seeks to scale up its theoretical framework to non-Chinese contexts of environmental degradation. Environmental justice research currently focuses on the local dimension of suffering, and calls for theoretical tools empowering marginalised communities to connect globally and participate in policy making at the international level. This research responds to this call and moves the field toward a global narrative of environmental health injustice, generating tools for the incorporation of ethnographic evidence into policy making and implementation.