Research interests

My current research interests lie at the intersection between urban (in)security, the production of the state, and the rise of the far-right in Europe.

Although statistics show that we have never been safer, fear and feelings of insecurity are everywhere on the rise. Instrumentalized by far-right actors, fear does things to people, and people do things with fear: some strengthen boundaries between “us” and “them” and build a vision of the world grounded in scarcity and warring, a world in which “security terrorizes, annihilates, divides”. In the process, the textures of urban spaces and socialities, and ideas about the state and citizenship change.

In my research, I examine ethnographically practices of formal and informal policing, and the processual connections between (in)security, space, and the (supra)state in the current context marked by multiple crises. I have conducted various forms of research in Italy, Germany, and The Netherlands on questions related to this topic.

I am particularly interested, in this context, in how Europe - a thing that can mean different things to different people - plays out relationally and processually across East/West, North/South, and center/periphery axes.

Photograph by Ana Ivasiuc, 2016, Rome