Sustainability, Hegemony and Urban Conflicts. Investigating Socio-Environmental (un)Sustainable Relations through Institutional Ethnography.
During my PhD I tried to answer these questions using IE. Specifically, I followed George Smith in his understanding of“political activists as institutional ethnographers”, exploringurban sustainability conflicts from the standpoint of activists in the cities of Seville and Milan.
Firstly, the research highlights the hegemonic nature of sustainability, linking it with state projects and hegemonicvisions of local authorities. What is socially scripted assustainable is the result of a spatially territorialized contested, precarious and changing equilibrium between different class interests, projects and meanings.
Secondly, it aims to explore how attempts of building counter-hegemonic visions and state projects are pursued by political urban movements. To this end, I explored movements’ production of texts as repositories of counter-hegemonic local consciousness as opposed to extra-local hegemonicideologies.
Thirdly, while considering urban movements as subjects, I sketched their forms of organisation and their activities in order to gain knowledge on potential shifting in social basesinvolved in sustainability hegemonic struggle.
Moreover, the research offers also several reflections about the fruitful integration of IE and Gramscian State theory. Indeed, both approaches share a Marxian understanding of society as the result of the social process of coordination, considering conflict as constitutive of social relations. The integration of Gramsci’s “integral understanding” of the State with Smith’s conceptualisation of contemporary societies asbeing reproduced by textually-mediated ruling relations can enhance our understanding of state power and its effects.Additionally, linking IE with broader Marxist theory couldprovide for recognition of Smith’s approach also in national context where her ontology is not known.