The political proposal of naturecultural studies|La proposta politica degli studi naturalculturali

Focusing on the junction of nature and culture, this issue aims to investigate how cultural studies have contributed to the production of an interdisciplinary field of critical knowledge dealing with the idea of nature and its critique. The conjuncture of the environmental crisis as a socio-political crisis has triggered what can be referred to as an ecological turn, reopening a debate on what is meant by nature, how to situate it in culture, while simultaneously re-specting the cultures of nature. Since the posthuman turn, cultural studies have extensively investigated the collapse of nature and culture by focusing on the forms and methods, the spaces of knowledge production, the practices and uses of knowledges. This onto-epistemological turn has profound ethical and political implica- tions, eventually displacing the universal subject of the modern Western tradition whose primacy was based on the naturalization of nature: a colonial and proprietary project, that through definition and subordination of bodies and environments, turned nature into an instrument, a resource, a terrain of conquest, a wasteland. Political Ecologies and Envi- ronmental Humanities have been proliferating in the constitutive hybridization of cultural studies, producing an interdisciplinary field thanks to the contributes of gender and post- colonial studies, neo-materialist approaches, the cultural studies of technoscience and new media, and not secondarily the irruption of non-Western, indigenous, and decolonial knowledges. While cultural studies are growing with new issues and perspectives, such as the centrality of environmental, reproductive and multi-species justice, it is important to reiterate that the ecological turn in cultural studies is not only about broadening the topics of inquiry. Actually, the intensification of the «regimes of interdependence» today makes it necessary to rethink what the individual and the social are, further situating and at the same time also decentralizing the traditional points of view. We envisage a fertile ground for developing a work that has characterized cultural studies since the outsets, paying attention to the processes of identification and signification in their reciprocity: a work that today can only be enriched thanks to the expansion of the codifying agents and the new significant/signifying relationships.