Post-doctoral research assistant
Irina is a post-doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence, where she is also a member of the Centre on Social Movement Studies COSMOS. She holds a BA in International Relations and Diplomatic Affairs from the University of Bologna's Faculty of Political Science and an MA in Culture, Communication, and Globalisation from Aalborg University, Denmark, with specializations in International Migrations and Ethnic Relations (IMER) and Global Gender Studies (GGS). In the Spring of 2023, she was a visiting fellow at the Centre for Agrarian Studies at Yale University, USA.
Her doctoral research focuses on community agriculture, specifically grassroots processes of land commoning for food production. She examines the political dimensions and transformative potential of these initiatives to redesign local food systems from below. Her methodologies are rooted in Participatory Action Research, emphasizing the co-creation of empirical results with and for local farming communities. Her academic interests broadly encompass the fields of social movements studies, food and agriculture, political ecology and environmental history, processual analysis, and innovative qualitative research techniques.
Irina has published works on feminist activism within neoliberal academia, migrant farmworkers in tomato supply chains, ecoprecarity at the intersection of ecological and labor struggles, and the historical processual analysis of common lands.