Roberta RAFFAETA'

I am associate professor of Socio-cultural Anthropology at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, and Deputy Director of NICHE (The New Institute: The Centre for Environmental Humanities), where I coordinate the research cluster ‘Technoscience, Health and Justice in an Interdependent Planet’. Since obtaining a PhD at the University of Lausanne (Laboratoire d’anthropologie culturelle et sociale, Faculté des Sciences Sociales et Politiques), I have worked at various universities in Italy (Milano-Bicocca, Bologna, Verona, Trento, Bolzano) and abroad (UCLA, UCSD, Monash Melbourne, Lausanne). My research has been funded by the European Commission (Marie Curie and ERC), Fulbright (Schuman), The Italian Ministry of Research (FARE, PRIN, PNRA), Wenner Gren and Parco Adamello Brenta.

My research stays at the intersection of medical anthropology, environmental anthropology and anthropology of science & technology. I am interested in ethnographically exploring and anthropologically theorizing how scientists, their publics and various communities produce knowledge about the relationship between humans and other-than-humans, and how this configures socio-political worlds across cosmopolitanism and forms of nativism. As knowledge production becomes increasingly mediated by technology, I have focused on how technoscience - the deep and inextricable intertwining of scientific production and technology – creates both new possibilities and troubling power dynamics within the tension between secularity - a colonial legacy grounded in the sacralization of reason - and what exceeds it. Empirically and ethnographically, in the last years, I have focused on two main topics: 1) microbiome science between human and environmental health - from US-based planetary computational models to Hawaiian Indigenous microbiology and 2) conflicts between local communities and conservation ecology interventions, in particular bear's reintroduction in Trentino Alps.