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 lies at the intersection of medical anthropology, environmental anthropology, and the anthropology of science and technology. I am interested in ethnographically exploring and anthropologically theorizing how scientists and different communities produce knowledge about the relationship between humans and other-than-humans, and how this configures socio-political worlds. As knowledge production becomes increasingly mediated by technology, I have focused on how technoscience—the inextricable intertwining of scientific production and technology—creates both possibilities and power dynamics. Ethnographically, in recent years I have focused on two main topics: (1) microbiome science across human and environmental health—from planetary computational models developed in the United States to Indigenous Hawaiian microbiology—and (2) political ecology in the Trentino Alps. Across these fields, I am increasingly interested in how different ways of knowing and relating to more-than-human worlds unsettle established political and epistemological boundaries, particularly those between cosmopolitanism and nativism and the epistemological and political limits of secularity.