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Pusceddu, A.M. (2026). (Un)sensing pollution: a political ecology of smelling. Pollen Conference: Diverse Origins, Multiple Futures: The Stories of Political Ecology,.

A. M. Pusceddu,  "(Un)sensing pollution: a political ecology of smelling", in Pollen Conf.: Diverse Origins, Multiple Futures: The Stories of Political Ecology, Barcelona, 2026

@misc{pusceddu2026_1792959737299,
	author = "Pusceddu, A.M.",
	title = "(Un)sensing pollution: a political ecology of smelling",
	year = "2026",
	howpublished = "Digital",
	url = "https://pollenpoliticalecology.network/pollen-2026/programme/#timetable"
}

TY  - CPAPER
TI  - (Un)sensing pollution: a political ecology of smelling
T2  - Pollen Conference: Diverse Origins, Multiple Futures: The Stories of Political Ecology
AU  - Pusceddu, A.M.
PY  - 2026
CY  - Barcelona
UR  - https://pollenpoliticalecology.network/pollen-2026/programme/#timetable
AB  - This paper addresses the changing meaning and experience of smells in the making and unmaking of industrial sensescapes as a social and political process. Building on extensive ethnographic research in two industrial regions in Italy (Brindisi) and Portugal (Sines), the paper examines a broad range of accounts, experiences and sensorial representations of noxiousness and pollution, within and outside the factories. Over several decades of entanglement with oil-based production, smells emerge as ambiguous traces of socioenvironmental transformation, controversially embedded in dominant narratives of development and modernization. Smells surface as corporeal memories of noxiousness, triggers of conflict, and idioms for expressing otherwise unspoken or muted stories of dispossession. Smells imbue the social experience of places, becoming intimate reminiscences of social reproduction, shaping sensorial habits in the workplace. They are also experienced as painful symptoms of illness and toxicity.
Moving beyond the immediacy and spontaneity of sensory reactions, the paper argues for considering sensorial experience as a fertile ground to explore the sedimentation of controversial histories of socioecological change. It suggests bringing in conversation a possible sensorial political ecology with the Gramscian notion of common sense. Despite common sense often being understood as a “mindset”, this paper emphasizes its practical and corporeal dimensions, which invite us to address the political relevance of non-verbalized, implicit, naturalized sensorial experience as an (un)contested ground of socioecological injustice. 
ER  -