Fragments of Embodied Transformation: A Feminist Environmental Humanities Approach to Lived Socio-Ecological Relations in Sardinia

Sammanfattning

This thesis explores socio-ecological transformation in Sardinia through a Feminist Environmental Humanities (FEH) perspective attentive to relationality, embodiment, affect, and lived experience. Rather than approaching transformation as a singular or technocratic process of transition toward sustainability, this study examines how environmental change is unevenly lived, sensed, narrated, and contested within everyday Sardinian life. Situated within the island’s layered histories of extraction, migration, tourism, depopulation, and environmental governance, this work understands Sardinia not as a passive field site, but as a living socio-ecological terrain shaped by tensions between belonging, care, development, and territorial control. Methodologically, this study adopts a situated, participatory, and multi-modal approach inspired by feminist epistemologies and composting methodologies. Fragments of stories, dialogues, poems, and reflections are engaged not as illustrative material, but as forms of lived knowledge capable of revealing dimensions of socio-ecological transformation often overlooked within dominant institutional frameworks. Through these contributions, transformation emerges through ordinary and affective relations: clothing exchanges, classroom conversations, exhausted coastlines, empty village benches, artistic collaborations, and contested renewable energy projects. This research argues that socio-ecological transformation in Sardinia unfolds through uneven relations of visibility, dependency, responsibility, and power. It demonstrates how dominant environmental narratives frequently privilege managerial and economic understandings of change while marginalizing embodied, emotional, and situated experiences. By foregrounding relational and more-than-human forms of knowing, this thesis contributes to FEH debates while offering a situated account of how socio-ecological life is inhabited, negotiated, and imagined within contemporary Sardinia.