Art-research collaborations: encountering, making, and developing body-health-environment relations in southern Italy

Book section : Chapter

In this chapter, we discuss art-research collaboration as a way to co-create knowledge and understand entangled environmental challenges in marginalised communities. We explore the relationships between bodies and the environment in a steel town in Taranto, Southern Italy. As a researcher/former NGO worker, and a community theatre organiser, we ask: how can art-research collaborations advance understandings of people-nature entanglements? By collecting data, analysing the results, and writing this article together using both academic and non-academic languages, in both English and Italian, we seek to challenge the hegemony of the academic and Anglo-Saxon writing traditions. Building on encounterings between feminist political ecology and Italian environmental humanities and making art-based research (body mapping), this article contributes to research inquiry aiming at co-creating knowledge in academic and non-academic spaces and to recent calls for developing more theoretically heterogeneous feminist political ecologies.

Authors: Jokela-Pansini, M; De Marco, D

• Publication status: Accepted
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
• Host title: Feminist Political Ecologies: A fusion of feminist thinking on nature and society.
• Language: English
• Subtype: Chapter