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. 

While in dialogue with other disciplines, my research practice is rooted in anthropology because it nourishes my desire for transformative political spaces. Anthropology offers both the conceptual imagination and the methodological tools to not only envision these spaces but to help bring them into being—by recognizing and elevating otherwise ways of knowing and practicing in the world. In my work, I am interested in ethnographically exploring and anthropologically theorizing the diverse ways in which people give meaning and assign value to ‘life’ and how this can provide insights on how to live well together as humans in an interdependent and more-than-human planet. To empirically approach these questions, I focus on the concept of ‘health’ as it connects human and environmental dimensions. Acknowledging the global and accelerating influence of technoscience on the governance of human and more-than-human existences, I study the interfaces between technoscience, health and social justice, in the constant effort to make these concepts more suited to the challenges we are facing in particular places and as humans. I explore how technoscience creates both new possibilities and troubling power dynamics in a planet where the interdependence of humans and non-humans is increasingly evident through biosocial crises. The regional focus of my research is Italy (Trentino Alps), California and Hawaii. My research takes me from libraries and labs to the ocean and mountains, tracing connections that span from microbes and bears to global computational models.