Doctoral candidate in project 6 - Tia Scazighino

My name is Tia Scazighino, and I am a doctoral candidate in HEALENAE’s Project 6: Toxicity: Urban Living in Landscapes of Extraction. Under the co-supervision of Filip De Boeck at KU Leuven and Paul Wenzel Geissler at Oslo University, I will conduct a comparative study on the toxic fallout of colonial mining practices in South Africa and the UK. Through fieldwork in post-mining landscapes and brownfield sites, my project aims to uncover how the lived embodiment of toxicity manifests in physical and social health, and the transformation of urban life, labour, and spatial belonging. 

Colonial mining activities in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa and North West England have led to the gradual pollution of soil, water, and air, causing intergenerational harm and making these places feel unliveable. Histories of racial capitalism and colonialism will help uncover the unequal distribution of health and environmental outcomes across landscapes, thus revealing how certain peoples and places are designated disposable. 

I am particularly excited to investigate recent struggles over the right to live in clean and life-sustaining environments in both South Africa and the UK, illustrating how communal resistance and practices of “commoning” can function as counter-forces to toxic abandonment.