Convenors
Lorenzo Natali, University of Milano-Bicocca
lorenzo.natali1@unimib.it
Anna Di Ronco, University of Bologna
anna.dironco@unibo.it
Environmental harm is often difficult to recognise, narrate and document. Its temporalities are frequently slow, its consequences unevenly distributed, and its impacts extend across human and more-than-human worlds. Even when identified, it can be difficult to have it legally recognised and to seek and obtain justice for those affected, whether they are human or more-than-human. As a result, conventional research approaches may struggle to capture lived experiences, affective and sensory dimensions, everyday meanings, and more-than-human entanglements of environmental degradation and harm.
This panel explores how ethnographic and qualitative research can contribute to making environmental harm visible and intelligible. We invite contributions that examine how diverse qualitative approaches – including ethnography, sensory and visual methods, narrative inquiry, participatory and arts-based research, autoethnography, and creative methodologies – can deepen our understanding of environmental harm, ecological conflict, multispecies relations, and environmental justice.
Rather than focusing on methodology as an end in itself, the panel asks how qualitative approaches enable researchers to access and explore dimensions of environmental harm that often remain overlooked: emotions, memories, embodied experiences, moral imaginaries, everyday practices, and more-than-human relationships. We are particularly interested in contributions that reflect on the possibilities and challenges of researching phenomena characterised by invisibility, uncertainty, contested knowledge, and complex forms of responsibility.
The panel welcomes scholars from criminology, sociology, anthropology, geography, environmental humanities, science and technology studies, law, and related disciplines. By bringing together different empirical fields and methodological traditions, it aims not only to showcase current research but also to stimulate interdisciplinary dialogue and contribute to the development of a community of scholars exploring environmental harm through innovative qualitative and ethnographic approaches. It also seeks to foster future collaborations, publications, and research projects.
Open questions
We invite papers that reflect on these themes and that engage with one or more of the following questions:
- In what ways do ethnographic and qualitative methods help make environmental harms visible when they are slow, dispersed, uncertain, or otherwise difficult to perceive and recognise?
- What can attention to emotions, memories, sensory experiences, everyday practices, and more-than-human relationalities reveal about how environmental harm is experienced and understood?
- How can qualitative researchers engage with more-than-human worlds and
multispecies relations without reproducing exclusively human-centred perspectives on harm and justice? - What methodological challenges arise when researching environmental harm
characterised by uncertainty, invisibility, contested knowledge, and uneven or
ambiguous forms of responsibility? - How can participatory, visual, sensory, arts-based, autoethnographic, and other creative methodologies generate alternative ways of knowing and communicating environmental harm?
- What ethical, political, and epistemological responsibilities arise when qualitative researchers seek to make environmental harm visible, particularly in contexts of ecological conflict and environmental injustice?
Keywords
Environmental harm; More-than-human worlds; Multispecies relations; Environmental justice; Creative methodologies
Sub-disciplines or cross-disciplinary areas of concern
Environmental sociology; Environmental anthropology; Green criminology; Human geography; Environmental humanities; Socio-legal studies; Environmental law
Convenors’ bios
Lorenzo Natali is Associate Professor at the Department of Law, University of Milano-Bicocca. His research focuses on green criminology, environmental victimisation, violence, restorative justice, and radical interactionism. He has also developed innovative qualitative, visual, and sensory methodologies for criminological research, particularly in relation to environmental harm and experiences of victimisation. His work combines criminological theory with
interdisciplinary approaches to explore violence, environmental justice, and processes of meaning-making and social interaction.
Anna Di Ronco is Associate Professor at the Department of Legal Studies at the University of Bologna. Her qualitative research in green criminology examines the repression of environmental activists and how they produce counter-representations and narratives of state violence, environmental harm, and resistance across diverse media and through visual and sensory forms. Her broader research interests include dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in urban space affecting both humans and nonhuman animals, as well as everyday practices of care, repair, and relationality towards the more-than-human.