This article offers an analysis of the encounter between the two natural environments of the Italian Po Plain and the Argentinian Pampa Gringa through the migration of Italian rural workers. Notably, we focus on the migration micro-histories of Emiliano-Romagnoli, who moved from Italy to Argentina during Italian Great Migration Era (1870-1955). Building on oral histories gathered in Italy and Argentina between 2005 and 2007, these micro-histories show how place-based landscapes of Italianness hybridised with the local landscape of the South American plains through Italian migrants' embodied memories, labour, and socio-environmental transformation practices. By focusing on Po Plain migrants' memories and experiences of the lowlands of northern Italy and the Argentinian pampas, we aim to offer a micro-historical perspective on the environmental history of migration.

In this article, the author analyzes the relation between migration and the environment within the context of Wallonia, the former mining region of Belgium. By applying the eco-marxist concept of metabolism, the article examines long-time relations between coal and Belgian society and its ties with migration and circulation processes. Beginning from the aftermath of World War Two, the author focuses on the so-called “men in exchange for coal” agreement between Italy and Belgium signed in 1946. By adopting a transdisciplinary approach typical of environmental humanities, the article contributes to the rising field of the environmental history of migration, also touching upon occupational health, biopolitics, miners' bodies, and labor history. In its conclusion, the article reflects on the historiographical implications of the toxic heritage produced by the metabolism of coal as well as by progressive historical narratives.

Italian mobility played a fundamental part in the history of the peninsula, since it was a global phenomenon reaching every continent except Antarctica. The Italian diaspora counted over 26 million expatriates who left the country between 1876 and 1976 and, to date, Italy remains one of the states that has contributed the most to the Great European Migration. Although impressive, these figures do not take into account pre-unitary Italian mobilities or Italian settlements in colonial territories. By adopting the perspective of environmental history of migration, this collection of essays allows us to consider various contextually embedded migratory environments, creating a means to find common constitutive features that allow us to explore and identify Italianness. Specifically, in this special issue, we intend to investigate how Italians transformed remote foreign environments in resemblances of their distant faraway homeland, their paesi, as well as used them as a means of materially re-imagining landscapes of Italianness. In return, their collective and individual identities were transformed by the new surroundings.

In this article, we discuss the role played by graffiti in representing, fomenting and studying binary and non-binary sentiments of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Through asocio-textual analysis of examples of public anti-gentrification and anti-touristification protest graffiti in Berlin, we consider the complex layers of history, identity, mobility, community and environment which have been folded onto one another throughout the city over the past decades. By investigating the textual politics of belonging and self as shown through the lens of graffiti, we argue that representational analyses of so-called banal public texts can help to comprehend the complexities that lie behind binary socio-cultural categories (e.g. local/non-local. In exploring some of the defining characteristics that distinguish ecocritical from environmental humanities approaches to critique, the article posits how multiple disciplines—even those well outside humanities subjects—might well be able to benefit from the humanities’ distinct approaches to cultural, or indeed social, analysis.

“I don’t particularly like the term Anthropocene, but perhaps, with a little monkeywrenching it can be repurposed”.[1] The words of Daegan Miller (p. 147) pretty much summarize my feeling towards the term Anthropocene, which is at the core of Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, edited by Gregg Mitman, Marco Armiero, and Robert Emmett (University of Chicago Press, 2018). The volume is the result of a “slam”: an art and scholarly contest organized by the CHE – Center for Culture, History and Environment at University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2014, in collaboration with KTH – Environmental Humanities Laboratory and Rachel Carson Center. The book is conceived as an environmental humanities approach – and critic – to the Anthropocene, understood as a cultural, taxonomic, ecological, and political process.

The chapter explores the link between environmental history and migration studies by analyzing the case of Italian miners in Wallonia after the World War II. Employing and Environmental Humanities approach, we use poems and novels to analyze the ecological shift operated by the capitalistic organization of coal extraction and how this affected the socio-environmental structure of the Walloon landscape and its relationship with the people who inhabited it. We aim to demonstrate how workers' bodies are a key element of the interaction between nature and society, constituting a vantage point to acces subaltern ecologies.

Don Mitchell is one of the most influential contemporary cultural geographers and has long been at the forefront of scholarship on intersections of capital, nature and labor. His work engages the geo-historical processes of landscape co-production and discusses how social, political and labor struggles that formed landscapes have been hidden or erased. Mitchell’s research and work are informed by an urgency to uncover the forces shaping the human–land dialectic. It is difficult not to sense profound urgency at the current political–ecological conjuncture, which is why we turned to Don Mitchell to reflect on his research, intellectual practice and the state of academia and activism today. The first section of the interview centers on Mitchell’s research and the tools and methods he employs in his work. In the second section of the interview, we discuss strategies and tactics in resistance struggles, campus activism and radical scholarship. Infused throughout the interview are the influences that have shaped Mitchell’s unique approach to teaching, research and a critical academic life. We conclude with a section on current academic practice.

“Une ville transhumante, ou metaphorique, s’insinue ainsi dans le texte clair de la ville planifiée et lisible”[1]. This statement perfectly enlightens the relationship between urban space and new forms of mobility in the European Union. Havens of many transnational patterns: here’s what globalized world cities[2] are turned in.

The 2008 crisis cut the bond that tied a generation of high skilled workers and globalized multicultural citizens[3] to their homeland, giving them the opportunity - or the necessity - to leave their countries. Paraphrasing Sayad[4], they suffer a double absence: they have been left behind by their States welfare and work policies and they experience a multiple social identity, that doesn’t lie within a Nation State or neither in an assimilation or integration process. World cities are gates of circular life and multi-situated identity[5] patterns opened by English proficiency, work and educational skills, and common cultural belonging.

From a socio-historical perspective, Italians in Berlin are the perfect case study to reconstruct new mobility patterns and new mobile agency in the EU[6]. The traditional chain migration, diaspora and push and pull models can’t explain the nature of these new identity patterns, vivified by web social networks and new mobility possibilities[7].

[1] De Certeau (1990), p. 142

[2] Cfr. Taylor (2001); (2004)

[3] Smith, Favel (2006); Brandi (2001)

[4] Sayad (1999)

[5] Sassen (2008); Castels (2005)

[6] Del Pra’ (2006)

[7] Netnography, oral sources and interdisciplinary approach are more and more important to analyze “communities of sentiments” (Appadurai 1996) in migration studies.