Xenia Manuela CHIARAMONTE

Xenia Chiaramonte is an Associate Professor at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, where she teaches Theory and Critique of Law and Law and Society. She is the author of "Governare il conflitto. La criminalizzazione del movimento No Tav" (Meltemi, Milan, 2019) and co-editor of the Italian critical criminology blog "Studi sulla Questione Criminale", as well as a member of the journal’s editorial board.

Her main research interests are twofold. The first concerns the history of contemporary punitive rationality, with a particular focus on the criminalisation of dissent and the role of social movements, within a broader genealogy of social defence—from positivist criminology to the contemporary punitive system. On these topics, she leads an ERC Starting Grant project titled P-AGE. Social Defence: Uncovering the Transnational Epistemology of the Punitive Age.

The second strand of research explores the relationship between law and the language and practices of contemporary ecology, a subject on which she is currently developing a forthcoming monograph.

Her research interests also include instituting practices, the relationship between law and social movements, and the intersections between law and gender issues, bioethics and feminism.

She was previously a researcher (RTD-B) at the Department of Law at the University of Catania, after holding fellowships at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry in Berlin (Germany) and at the CAS SEE – Center for Advanced Studies South Eastern Europe, University of Rijeka (Croatia). She obtained a Master’s degree from the Oñati International Institute for the Sociology of Law (Spain) and has also conducted research at several international institutions, including the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley (United States).

Since 2015, she has been teaching in the Master’s programme in Critical Criminology and Social Security at the Universities of Bologna and Padua. She also teaches the module “Law and Environment” in the Ecosocialism Advanced Course at the University of Milano-Bicocca, as well as, together with Federica Buongiorno, “Theories and Critical Gender Studies” at the University of Florence.