Imagining the future in post-industrial Taranto, Italy

ongoing

The port city of Taranto has grown in the shadow of ILVA, the largest steel plant in Europe. Since the 1960s, ILVA has provided the people of Taranto with livelihoods and hopes for prosperous futures but also contributed to the city’s environmental degradation and public health crisis. In 2012, ILVA was seized after a court's preliminary hearing deemed the steel plant responsible for Taranto's public health and environmental crisis. To reduce polluting emissions, the blast furnaces were shut down and the steel workforce faced layoffs. A socio-economic crisis ensued, adding to the environmental and public health crisis. Since then, the future of Taranto has been on hold: the state's promises to implement environmental policies and nationalise the plant have never materialised. Exploring the tensions between labour and environment, TarasLAB asks: How can the future be imagined and reclaimed when people's livelihoods mostly depend on what is likely to threaten their lives? To answer this question, it combines ethnographic and collaborative visual methods to engage the research participants in a collective project of multimodal storytelling, which will unfold through and culminate in the co-production of an ethnographically informed graphic novel. TarasLAB leverages anthropological theories and methods to analyse timely issues of interests to both society and policymakers: in addressing Tarantini’s concerns about their future, the project aligns its objectives with the European challenges to make Europe sustainable and secure by 2050. The project's results will add to scholarly debates on sustainable futures in the European semi-periphery while offering a unique contribution on the epistemological affordances of Graphic Anthropology. The Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna will offer the applicant consistent training-through-research in Political Anthropology, enabling her to grow into an independent and confident scholar.