Under the Skin of the Factory: The Embodied Environmental Politics of Steelworkers in Dunkerque (France) and IJmuiden (the Netherlands)

ABSTRACT This paper takes the body as a focal point to deliver new insights into what drives or constrains labour environmentalism. More precisely, it looks at how labour–environment dynamics are inscribed in and negotiated through the bodies of steelworkers in IJmuiden (the Netherlands) and Hauts‐de‐France (France). While existing scholarship on Labour Environmentalism has explored relations between workers and environmental politics, the embodied experiences of working in polluting industries remain underexamined. This is problematic because it is precisely through ‘the body’ that industrial workers experience harm and can produce an ecological consciousness. Drawing on political ecology and critical geography, the paper conceptualises the body as a dialectic between the accumulation of environmental harm and emancipatory potential. The narrative interviews show how workers' bodies are sites of harm while carrying emancipatory potential. However, this emancipatory potential can be constrained. This underscores the persistence of the ‘jobs versus environment’ tension in practice.