Host Institute |
Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB)
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Topic |
Careful commoning. An embodied feminist urban political ecology from the European South.
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Supervisors |
Panagiota Kotsila, Stefania Barca and Giovanna di Chiro
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Secondment 1 |
International Institute of Social Studies
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Mentor |
Wendy Harcourt
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Secondment 2 |
Associazione Culturale Punti di Vista
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Mentor |
Sabrina Aguiari
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Fieldwork |
Naples, Italy
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Ilenia Iengo is an ESR in Feminist Political Ecology and Environmental Humanities. She holds a Bachelor Degree in International Relations from Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” anda Masters Degree in International Environmental Studies from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) Her thesis is an investigation on the Urban Political Ecology of waste conflicts, toxic biographies and environmental injustice in Campania, Italy, where she is part of the Stop Biocidio coalition. She has worked for KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory in Stockholm on “ToxicBios: a guerrilla narrative project mapping contamination, illness and resistance for emancipatory storytelling”. Her research focuses on the of politicisation of illness, narratives of contamination, trans-corporeality, feminist and queer studies, environmental justice activism, urban commons and degrowth, geographies of radical urban practices. She nurtures interest to work at the interface between academic research and activism. Her current research explores coalition politics across environmental justice and trans-feminist movements in Naples, Italy. Her investigation particularly engages with prefigurative politics of urban and peri-urban commoning practices. |
Objectives of the research
Economic growth is assumed to play an essential role in the dynamic stabilisation of societies, by guaranteeing security and revenue for welfare states, and by securing the legitimation of democracies. In recent years this fundamental assumption has been questioned by degrowth movements in the Global North that advocate the need to limit economic growth and to change radically resource management patterns. The ESR will critically interrogate degrowth experiments in Italy by undertaking research with local communities. The focus will be to examine changing gender roles, the reorganisation of labour and new consumption patterns in local projects such as transition towns. In addition, the project will investigate the connections between the degrowth movement and the emancipatory projects of feminism and gender/queer movements. A central feature of the research will be to investigate alliances among feminism and queer movements with degrowth movements in their collective search for alternative models of well-being and of a ‘good life’.
Expected Results
The ESR will map out social justice movements contributions to alternative models of well-being and of a ‘good life’ centered on the emancipatory projects of degrowth, feminist and queer movements.
Progress update
In July 2020 Ilenia submitted the Ethical review for the European Commission, in September 2020 she passed the 2nd year PhD evaluation seminar at ICTA-UAB and in October 2020 she submitted the Career Development Plan. In September 2020, she submitted the abstract to the article ‘Endometriosis and environmental violence: an embodied, situated knowledge from the Land of Fires in Naples, Italy’. She is currently finishing the first draft and I will submit the full paper in 2021.
Publications by Ilenia Iengo
Forthcoming: