Olive trees in the more-than-human Anthropocene: The multidimensional politics of plant disease in Southern Italy

This thesis examines the Xylella fastidiosa outbreak in Apulia, Southern Italy, as a multidimensional political conflict of the Anthropocene. Since its detection in 2013, the bacterium has devastated olive landscapes, unsettled rural livelihoods, and sparked conflicts over scientific authority, plant health governance, and agricultural futures. Drawing on ethnographic and autoethnographic research, and bringing together political ecology, environmental humanities, STS, and critical agrarian studies, the thesis follows the relations among olive trees, bacteria, insect vectors, farmers, scientists, policymakers, activists, markets, and changing agrarian infrastructures. It argues that the epidemic cannot be understood as an exclusively biological event, but rather as the outcome of intertwined ecological, economic, epistemological, and ontological clashes. By developing a 4Ps framework—political economy, political ecology, political epistemology, and political ontology—it shows how the conflict around the epidemic exemplifies the multidimensionality of socio-environmental struggles. The thesis ultimately asks how diseased agroecosystems might be cared for beyond productivist modernization and nostalgic conservation, amid irreversible loss and uncertainty.