What are the terms of accumulation and resistance to capitalist extraction?
How are the rights of access to the world’s so-called ‘natural resources’ formulated, negotiated and contested?
How are the boundaries between legitimate or il|legitimate extraction, production and exchange drawn, reproduced and maintained in today’s increasingly globalized spaces of resource commodification?
Who is included?
Who is excluded?
What kinds of politics are involved?
What kinds of spatial connections and disconnections do we see emerging?
My research focuses on the geographies of so-called resource frontiers: environments where public authority over the commodification of ‘nature’ is fundamentally being questioned, reconfigured and reformulated. More specifically, I am asking how the relations between capital, labour, & public authority are actively negotiated and renegotiated in the globalized spaces of supply chain capitalism.
My interest has brought me, amongst others, to study the political ecologies of minerals and agricultural commodity markets and their violent reconfigurations in Central Africa (Democratic republic of Congo) as well as in Southern Europe (Italy). These engagements have enabled me to raise wider questions about the limits of sovereign power, both in a geographical and anthropological sense. In all these cases, I regard the boundary between legitimate or il|legitimate authority as a liminal zone, a grey space where regulations and norms are fundamentally reformulated.
These personal pictures above refer to my research in commodity frontiers in Central Africa -particularly minerals extraction in Eastern DRC- and in Southern Europe -particularly agro-food production (in Puglia’s and Basilicata’s industrialised tomato fields). In this research I continue to combine my theoretical interests with a dedication to in-depth longitudinal ethnographic study among the people involved in such commodity production as well as a strong public engagement beyond the confines of policy-oriented research.
I am currently employed as senior assistant professor in Geography at the University of Bologna. For contact details please visit my university web page.
