“Working on MOSE” article out now!
Huge thanks to the journal SHIMA for picking up and publishing my first article, adapted from my masters’ thesis work on labor issues and climate adaptation in Venice, Italy. I went into this research expecting to work on a small conflict between workers and citizen-activists. What ended up in the article was instead something much bigger: workers telling me, in recorded interviews but also in off-the-record hints and implications, that the Italian state is robbing them of their future. The one thing that I wish everyone in Venice takes away from this article is how strongly the lagoon features in the future imaginary of those who work with or on the water. MOSE workers mix their own fates with the fate of the lagoon, often telling me that a non-responsive government will make the lagoon, and their jobs too, disappear. Sea-level rise is not just a technical issue for these technicians. They are among the first, in Venice, to feel the enclosure effects that a rigid project like MOS...