Vanessa Grotti
I am a social and medical anthropologist, currently Associate Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Bologna (Ravenna Campus). I joined Unibo in 2020, after 5 years spent as Part-Time Professor at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies, European University Institute (Fiesole), where I was Director of the EU Border Care project. I was trained in France and in the UK, where I spent most of my early career years, as research and teaching fellow at the University of Oxford, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and the Collège de France (Laboratoire d'anthropologie sociale). I left the UK for Italy just before Brexit, in 2015, with the intention of combining career progression with family and heritage, as part of a process of return/circular migration which is not dissimilar to those I now teach and study alongside my MA and doctoral students at Unibo.
I have been conducting field research in Central and Lowland South America since 2002 and in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic since 2015. I have published on medicine and colonialism, maternal and reproductive health, human-nonhuman relations, kinship and gender, personhood, animism and material culture, migration and borderlands, and history and memorialisation. Most of my publications are in English, but I have also published in French, Italian, and Portuguese. I now teach and supervise at all levels, from undergraduate students to postdoctoral researchers, in English, Italian, and French.
My long-standing research interests centre around the study of kinship and reproduction, with a particular focus on relations and encounters of care (and their ontological equivocations), within medical institutions and beyond. In my work, I have proposed the concept of nurture to describe analytically processes of care which are intrinsically asymmetric although they do not appear to be so at first. I have studied these processes in Lowland South America, by documenting historically and anthropologically first contacts, medical missions, and the birth of the clinic in tropical Amazonian borderlands. Anthropological and historical research on the latter was funded by several grants, including the UK ESRC, the Gates Cambridge Trust, the British Academy and the Wellcome Trust.
I have also studied relations of care (at the beginning and end of life) within hospitals and emergency NGO clinics in European borderlands in the Mediterranean and in Overseas France. I was PI of an ERC-funded project entitled EU Border Care (2015-21) which examined migration, maternity care and reproductive health in European borderlands. Together with M. Brightman (Unibo) and N. Ben-Yehoyada (Columbia University) I was also co-investigator on a collaborative project which studies migrant death, mourning and memorialisation in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, ‘Ecologies of Remembrance: The Moral Afterlives of Migrant Human Remains Along the Central Mediterranean Route’ (2018-21).
My new current research project is still centred on relations of nurture and care, and examines human-nonhuman formal and informal cohabitation and reproduction in the increasingly feral and uncontained coastal landscape of the Po Delta (Adriatic). This new project is framed within a larger research consortium I am developing with colleagues from anthropology, design and law at the University of Bologna and the University of Melbourne, around a new interdisciplinary project on the nurture of life and reproduction at the Land-Sea Interface (NURSEA).
I also have two smaller and more personal ongoing ethnographic projects: one is on the social memory and interspecies regeneration of the port of the city of Ravenna, based on the collaboration with dockers, trade unions, students and activists. A more personal ethnographic project explores the ethics of lawlessness and sociality among subsistence farmers in the southern Romagna Appennines. This last project partly involves working on family heritage and oral history, following personal kinship networks and archives.
Supervisors: MPhil and PhD supervisor (2002-07): Dr. Stephen Hugh-Jones (Cambridge)
Address: Dipartimento di Beni Culturali (Unibo)
Via degli Ariani, 1
48121 Ravenna (RA)
Italy
I have been conducting field research in Central and Lowland South America since 2002 and in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic since 2015. I have published on medicine and colonialism, maternal and reproductive health, human-nonhuman relations, kinship and gender, personhood, animism and material culture, migration and borderlands, and history and memorialisation. Most of my publications are in English, but I have also published in French, Italian, and Portuguese. I now teach and supervise at all levels, from undergraduate students to postdoctoral researchers, in English, Italian, and French.
My long-standing research interests centre around the study of kinship and reproduction, with a particular focus on relations and encounters of care (and their ontological equivocations), within medical institutions and beyond. In my work, I have proposed the concept of nurture to describe analytically processes of care which are intrinsically asymmetric although they do not appear to be so at first. I have studied these processes in Lowland South America, by documenting historically and anthropologically first contacts, medical missions, and the birth of the clinic in tropical Amazonian borderlands. Anthropological and historical research on the latter was funded by several grants, including the UK ESRC, the Gates Cambridge Trust, the British Academy and the Wellcome Trust.
I have also studied relations of care (at the beginning and end of life) within hospitals and emergency NGO clinics in European borderlands in the Mediterranean and in Overseas France. I was PI of an ERC-funded project entitled EU Border Care (2015-21) which examined migration, maternity care and reproductive health in European borderlands. Together with M. Brightman (Unibo) and N. Ben-Yehoyada (Columbia University) I was also co-investigator on a collaborative project which studies migrant death, mourning and memorialisation in the Mediterranean and the Adriatic, funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, ‘Ecologies of Remembrance: The Moral Afterlives of Migrant Human Remains Along the Central Mediterranean Route’ (2018-21).
My new current research project is still centred on relations of nurture and care, and examines human-nonhuman formal and informal cohabitation and reproduction in the increasingly feral and uncontained coastal landscape of the Po Delta (Adriatic). This new project is framed within a larger research consortium I am developing with colleagues from anthropology, design and law at the University of Bologna and the University of Melbourne, around a new interdisciplinary project on the nurture of life and reproduction at the Land-Sea Interface (NURSEA).
I also have two smaller and more personal ongoing ethnographic projects: one is on the social memory and interspecies regeneration of the port of the city of Ravenna, based on the collaboration with dockers, trade unions, students and activists. A more personal ethnographic project explores the ethics of lawlessness and sociality among subsistence farmers in the southern Romagna Appennines. This last project partly involves working on family heritage and oral history, following personal kinship networks and archives.
Supervisors: MPhil and PhD supervisor (2002-07): Dr. Stephen Hugh-Jones (Cambridge)
Address: Dipartimento di Beni Culturali (Unibo)
Via degli Ariani, 1
48121 Ravenna (RA)
Italy
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Friday 8th March 2024, 12:00-13:00 (CET)
‘Human potato relatedness and affective attunement across species in the Peruvian Highlands’
Olivia Angé, Professor of Anthropology, Laboratoire d’anthropologie des mondes contemporains, Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Abstract: Highland people in the Cuzco region of Peru eat so much potato that they are aware of their body as being made of this tuber. Not an ingredient to be passively absorbed, potatoes are related to humans in a reversible genealogy whereby they are both mother and child to their grower. Observing how this relation is enacted in practices highlights mutual nurturing as a key interaction that creates kinship. Nurturing entails the circulation of kusisqa, a Quechua notion of joy which complexifies an established conceptualization of affect as pre-reflexive reaction. Imbued with emotionality and self-reflexivity, potatoes’ contentment is a core concern for cultivators. A focus on affective attunement between humans and plant crops through labour and ingestion offers new perspectives on the substance of kinship and interspecies mutuality of being.
Short bio: Olivia Angé (she/her) is Professor of anthropology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant SeedsValues. She specializes in the study of agriculture, value creation, and relatedness in the Andes. Since 2014, she has been doing research on potato cultivation in Peru. She has also conducted extensive fieldwork on barter fairs in the Argentinean cordillera. She is the author of Barter and Social Regeneration in the Argentinean Andes (Berghahn 2022, 2nd edn.), and co-author of Ecological Nostalgias (Berghahn 2021, 1st edn.).
Zoom registration link:
https://unibo.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYqcOmorT0jG9z6fPO-UsV7k5IGbO8VYjbS
Articles
Friday 8th March 2024, 12:00-13:00 (CET)
‘Human potato relatedness and affective attunement across species in the Peruvian Highlands’
Olivia Angé, Professor of Anthropology, Laboratoire d’anthropologie des mondes contemporains, Université Libre de Bruxelles.
Abstract: Highland people in the Cuzco region of Peru eat so much potato that they are aware of their body as being made of this tuber. Not an ingredient to be passively absorbed, potatoes are related to humans in a reversible genealogy whereby they are both mother and child to their grower. Observing how this relation is enacted in practices highlights mutual nurturing as a key interaction that creates kinship. Nurturing entails the circulation of kusisqa, a Quechua notion of joy which complexifies an established conceptualization of affect as pre-reflexive reaction. Imbued with emotionality and self-reflexivity, potatoes’ contentment is a core concern for cultivators. A focus on affective attunement between humans and plant crops through labour and ingestion offers new perspectives on the substance of kinship and interspecies mutuality of being.
Short bio: Olivia Angé (she/her) is Professor of anthropology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant SeedsValues. She specializes in the study of agriculture, value creation, and relatedness in the Andes. Since 2014, she has been doing research on potato cultivation in Peru. She has also conducted extensive fieldwork on barter fairs in the Argentinean cordillera. She is the author of Barter and Social Regeneration in the Argentinean Andes (Berghahn 2022, 2nd edn.), and co-author of Ecological Nostalgias (Berghahn 2021, 1st edn.).
Zoom registration link:
https://unibo.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYqcOmorT0jG9z6fPO-UsV7k5IGbO8VYjbS
Expecting by Sandrine Martin is a delicate and memorable story that involves the reader through many details and data collected by EUBorderCare and while avoiding rhetoric and stereotypes. Expecting is about the parallel paths of Sham and Matina - a migrant refugee from Syria and a Greek midwife working for an NGO, respectively. To create Expecting, the artist Sandrine Martin and the researcher Vanessa Grotti with her team – notably with Cynthia Malakasis – exchanged points of views and impression at length, and also travelled together to a refugee camp in Greece.
“What are we to do?”: Opening potentialities and creating possibilities in contemporary Albania
Nataša Gregorič Bon, Research Associate & Assistant Professor, Institute of Anthropological and Spatial Studies, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts (ZRC SAZU)
Abstract: Accelerated extractionism, increasing emigration, gentrification, land grabbing and general political crises seem to be plunging contemporary lifeworld’s in Albania into uncertainty and mistrust. How can this gloomy present be restructured in the everyday lives of people in Albania, which is often referred to as one of the lowest income countries in Europe according to international economic assessments? While many local economists and politicians still cling to the discourse of postcommunist transition, which by definition should promise a better future and prosperity for all, inhabitants are increasingly confronted with a sense of powerlessness in their everyday lives, where alternative scenarios often seem non-existent and overdrawn with the passive attitude that is often explained with the rhetorical question ‘what are we to do’. In the midst of this passive and uncertain present, this presentation attends to specific individuals - artists, environmental and social activists - who are trying to overcome this prevailing thought matrix in order to ensure general well-being. The presentation explores the processes, plans and aspirations of these few individuals who, through their artistic projects and various social and environmental actions, juxtapose different layers of the past, restore and interpret them in the nexus of contemporary events. By engaging in sensory and affective domains, these rare individuals seek to open up a space that has the potential and capacity to restore collective commons, unlock future possibilities and improve well-being in the country.
Short bio: Nataša Gregorič Bon (she/her) is a social anthropologist with a long standing research in Albania. Her interests include spatial anthropology, movements, mobility and migrations, border dynamics, anthropology of water and environmental anthropology. She is the author of the monograph Spaces of Discordance (ZRC Publishing House, 2008), translated into Albanian and published by Morava Publishing House in 2015. She is also co-author of the monograph (Non)movement and Place-Making (ZRC Publishing House, 2013) and co-editor of the volumes Remitting, Restoring and Building Contemporary Albania (Palgrave MacMillan/Springer Books, 2021) and Moving Places (Berghahn Books, 2016). For the latter, she and co-editor Jaka Repič received the Slovenian Research Agency's award Excellent in Science. She has an editor for Anthropological Notebooks since 2023 and co-editor of the Space, Place, Time at the ZRC Publishing House since 2013. She was Departmental Visitor at the University of Canberra (Australia), Visiting Fellow at SSEES, UCL (UK) and Centre of South Eastern and European Studies (CSEES), University of Graz (Austria) and Visiting Lecturer at Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki (Finland).
Zoom registration link:
https://unibo.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUod--orzkpHtTDZAmkVsH2i2_sQnwErQir
Reviving anti-imperialist nodes of solidarity on a global scale
Walaa Alqaisiya, Marie Curie Global Fellow, Università Ca’ Foscari & Columbia University and Matteo Capasso, Marie Curie Global Fellow, Università Ca’ Foscari & Columbia University
Abstract: In the last two decades, racial capitalism and settler colonialism have consolidated as major conceptual tools to rethink the struggles of racialised groups in the North/South of the world. Respectively, they emphasize the primacy of race and indigeneity as lenses required to frame political oppression on a worldwide scale, and responses to it from within the political and epistemic needs—i.e., abolitionism and decoloniality—of these positionalities. However, they often do so by ignoring the contributions of anti-imperialism and Third World Marxism in advancing these causes. This piece reassembles the intellectual and political solidarities established across the Lakota nation (US), Libya and Palestine, through archival (from the late 1960s-80s) and field (2022-23) research. Drawing on a south-led theory and political praxis, we recentre anti-imperialism to the struggle of the Global South and racial “minorities” in the US imperial core with a twofold aim. First, gauge the value of the historical and material proximity of racialised/indigenous working class to their Southern compatriots; and second, challenge the collapse of radical theories within the political and intellectual boundaries of the liberal democracy project in the US imperial core.
Short bios: Walaa Alqaisiya (she/her) is a Marie Curie Global Fellow working across: Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy), Columbia University in the City of New York (USA) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK). She received her PhD in Human Geography from Durham University (UK), and worked as a Teaching Fellow in Gender, Sexuality and Conflict at the Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics. Her forthcoming book Decolonial Queering in Palestine examines queer politics and aesthetics from a Palestinian native positionality. Walaa’s Marie Curie Fellowship extends her work on settler colonialism, decoloniality and gender whilst bringing an ecological and environmental dimension to these fields. It draws on multiple locales of indigeneity (i.e., Turtle Island, Palestine) to examine comparable historical and political processes of colonial ecocidal violence and the value of Indigene’s decolonial ecologies.
Matteo Capasso (he/his) is a Marie Curie Global Fellow between Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and Columbia University in the City of New York, US. He was previously a Max Weber Research Fellow at the European University Institute and Visiting Fellow at the University of Turin. He is the author of the upcoming monograph, Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (Syracuse University Press) that reconstructs the last two decades of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, leading up to the 2011 events that sanctioned its fall. Since 2013, he has been working for Middle East Critique, currently as Managing Editor. His current project focuses on the study of US-led imperialism through the Libyan microcosm. His research interests include political history, everyday politics, and international political economy, with a focus on the modern Middle East and North Africa and the Global South at large.
Zoom registration link:
https://unibo.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZApcOGvrjMrGNR8-JTvu0wzkKQhnja37Nen
On border beings
Carolina Kobelinsky, Researcher, Laboratoire d’ethnologie et de sociologie comparative, Paris Nanterre-CNRS.
Abstract: Death is a constant feature in lives at the borders for those trying to reach Europe without the necessary authorizations from nation-states: it is a possible eventuality, a material reality, and a ghostly presence. At the border between the enclave of Melilla and the Moroccan province of Nador, there are many stories told about near death experiences while attempting to cross both land and maritime borders, and about abandoned dead bodies. Other common narratives focus on the living dead and their efforts to resist death, on the missing presumed dead, on unidentified bodies, and on the living individuals who are haunted by the dead or by the disappeared. Although disruptive, border deaths are also normalized in ordinary life at the border, producing new modes of action and redefining traditional categories. After border deaths, new beings —and new forms of being— emerge and engage in collective life. Many of these entities, which I refer to as “border beings”, are not necessarily physically embodied or properly tangible, but they account for particular forms of existence and provide a condensed version of lived experience. Drawing on ethnographic material collected among male border-crossers from West African countries, I will explore how different border beings all co-exist at the border. I am concerned, more broadly, with the effects of the contemporary border regime on everyday life.
Short bio: Carolina Kobelinsky (she/her) is CNRS Research fellow in anthropology at the Laboratory of Ethnology and Comparative Sociology, University of Paris Nanterre. Her research centres around borders and migration. Her current research deals with the material and symbolic treatment of dead border-crossers in Southern Europe. Her latest publications are a co-edited volume (with L. Rachédi) entitled Traces et mobilités posthumes. Rêver les futurs des défunts en contextes migratoires (Pétra, 2023), and a collective essay (with. M. Lagumier, C. Jungen, S. Houdart, A. Herrou, A. Guillou & S. Carton de Grammont), Parier sur l’espérance. Exercice d’anticipation pour s’accrocher à ce qui vient (Cambourakis, 2023).
Zoom registration link:
https://unibo.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZErcOGhrT4oGdeniulis8QrCkI_zgEEJdTt