DEEP WOUNDS: DEgradation and injustice in Ecological Peripheries: WOUNDed minority landScapes in Central-Eastern Europe

This interdisciplinary project combines the analysis of instances of environmental degradation with patterns of injustices involving ethnic minority communities in four different border locations in Central and Eastern Europe, drawing on the notion of environmental racism. It examines differentforms of more or less (in)visible “wounds” in the landscapes which affect the ways in which members of minority groups relate to their disruptedecologies, as well as their possibility to preserve forms of physical, psychological, linguistic, and social wellbeing.

DEEP WOUNDS aims to contribute to highlighting the importance of environmental issues that take place on the so-called margins of Europe, focusing on the fates of minority groups (represented as “others" through specific processes of “othering”) that seem to be largely excluded fromresearch and debate on environmental change. It conceptualizes the idea of 'wounds in the landscape' and points to a variety of historical and contemporary cases involving marginalized ethnolinguistic groups that have been particularly neglected in the national modernization narratives of both capitalist and communist states. This is done using a mixed methods approach consisting of analyzing quantitative data on environmental degradation and pollution as well as qualitative data on the physical and socio-psychological well-being of the affected minority communities.

The cases considered will include the impact of mining (lignite and copper respectively) on Sorbian communities in Eastern Germany and Vlach communities in Eastern Serbia, the consequences of militarization and waste dumping in the Slovenian-inhabited Karst in Italy, and the implicationsof the exposure to environmental risk among the Roma communities living at the Slovenian border with Croatia.

The innovative aspect of this projectconsists in its interdisciplinary and comparative perspective which proves essential to illuminate the multiple meanings of ecological change anddamage for different cultures and societies. In this way, it aims at shedding light on the relationality and interconnectedness of environmental and sociocultural phenomena in a minority perspective that highlights the vulnerability of ethnolinguistic groups and their environments in Europe.