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CES Researcher Introduction Seminar October 8th, 2009, 17.00, CES Seminar Room Presentation Pollution, as affluent societies have experienced it, begins within the workplace: before encountering the environment and society in general, it meets the work environment and the bodies of the workers who have handled toxic and carcinogenic substances while being incompletely informed about, and protected from, their effects. The history of modern industry is, at the same time, a history of work-related diseases, which have become sites of social struggles in the post-war years and have, on occasion, led to legislative reform in the broader field of environmental policy. I consider these struggles a relevant kind of Ecological Distribution Conflicts, i.e. conflicts for the distribution of social costs. My current research project is concerned with the environmental and social costs of the Italian petrochemical industry, which is owned by a mixed State/private multinational company (the ENI group) and whose major extraction areas are in Angola and in Libya. In the course of the last 30 years, the Italian petrochemical industry has produced not only gasoline and plastics, but also a huge amount of toxic and carcinogenic substances which have negatively affected the work and living environment of many people. My research looks at how these costs have been distributed between North and South, and among the Italian population, and how labor and environmental movements have understood and reacted to them. Stefania Barca (Naples 1968) got her PhD in Economic History from the University of Bari (Italy) in 1997. She has worked in several Italian Universities, where she has taught Economic, Business, and Environmental History. In 2005-06 she was visiting scholar at the Program in Agrarian Studies of Yale University, and from 2006 to 2008 she was a 'Ciriacy Wantrup' postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley. She has published a number of articles in Italian and international History journals, and two books (in Italian). She is now working on a book manuscript on water enclosures and the industrial revolution. Her new research project deals with industrial hazards and the relationships between labor and environmental movements in a transnational perspective. |