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Imagining the future in post-industrial Taranto, Italy

Project description

Imagining a future beyond industry in Taranto

For many years, the city of Taranto in southern Italy relied on ILVA, the largest steel plant in Europe, for jobs and financial security. At the same time, citizens dealt with pollution and public health problems related to the plant. After a 2012 court decision shut the plant, many people lost their jobs and the city went into a major socio-economic downturn. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions programme, the TarasLAB project will study the conflict between jobs and potential environmental hazards. Researchers will team up with residents, using ethnographic and group visual methods to produce a narrative told in different ways, ending with a graphic novel that documents their lives and aspirations. The project provides an insight into just transitions and demonstations what graphic anthropology can do.

Objective

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.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European Fellowships

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) HORIZON-MSCA-2024-PF-01

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Coordinator

UNIVERSITAT WIEN
Net EU contribution
€ 214 344,72
Address
UNIVERSITATSRING 1
1010 Wien
Austria
Region
Ostösterreich Wien Wien
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
No data