Abstract

Only recently has criminology turned its attention to environmental disasters, harms and risks - a perspective known as «green criminology» (South 1998). Building on the green criminological endeavour, the proposed project entails a pilot study whose aim is to explore the social perception and imagination that rotate around the seriousness of environmental crimes and harms. Drawing on a case study - Huelva, a town in southern Spain, heavily polluted by a huge industrial and chemical plant built during the 1960s in close proximity to the town - I will explore the following questions: how do social actors interpret and feel about those peculiar social facts - environmental crimes - that impact social and ecological worlds? How can one explore the various forms through which environmental victimization can be perceived, starting also from one's own experience of life? In order to investigate these complex dimensions, the technique I propose can be defined «itinerant soliloquy». Through this technique and thanks to the constitutive ambiguity of experience, images and places, the social researcher will be able to explore the multiple levels tied to the social perception of environmental victimization.