IS THERE AN INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE IN THE URBAN NORTH? Re/inventing local knowledge and communities in the struggles over garbage and incinerators in Campania, Italy

This paper deals with the narratives about environmental struggles over garbage facilities in Campania, Italy, a region which, in the last decades, has become the worldwide icon of the failure in the management of its own metabolism. In particular I analyze the narratives about the activists involved in the struggles and their creative interaction with scientific knowledge. My thesis is that ecological conflicts--at least in this specific case--have been producers of communities and knowledges. Instead of reinforcing the narrative about "natural" communities living in a space of radically otherness and oppressed by global villains, I would like to explore the interstitial South, mixed with the North and its science and contradictions. Using a collection of interviews and some grassroots documentaries about the crisis and the mobilization, I analyze the rising of a collective knowledge and the making of communities through the very experience of resistance to the governmentality plan of waste disposal.