Irene FALCONIERI

Irene Falconieri is a tenure-track Assistant Professor (RTD-B) of Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Educational Sciences, University of Catania, where she teaches Anthropology of Heritage and Tourism and Cultural Anthropology and coordinates the Research Laboratory on Tourism, Environment and Urban Transformations. She holds the National Scientific Qualification as Associate Professor. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of Messina and has held postdoctoral research fellowships at the Universities of Catania and Messina, taking part in national and international projects including the PRIN projects “Ecofrizioni dell’Antropocene” and “S.E.L.F.”, reCITY, and “Sicilian Rebirth” at the University of Toronto Scarborough.

Her research explores the ways in which the concepts of vulnerability, risk and care take shape in the relations between communities, environment and institutions, through the ethnography of disasters, socio-environmental conflicts and urban transformations in contemporary Sicily. The first core of this work is an anthropology of disasters attentive to their processual dimension: starting from an ethnography of the 2009 flood that struck a municipality in north-eastern Sicily, she has approached disaster as the “slow unfolding of an event” rather than a sudden rupture, shedding light on the rhetorics and conflicts surrounding public policies, the practices of resistance of affected territories and people, the social memory of catastrophes, and the making of emergency into a permanent condition and a governmental apparatus.

Her critique of the emergency apparatus and her processual approach have extended to the analysis of the “eco-frictions” of the Anthropocene: moving between courtrooms and the towns of the industrial area, she has examined, in the Syracuse petrochemical complex, how a historically constructed interdependence with heavy industry has shaped forms of consent, activism and contestation, in which bodies, environment and health become objects of evidence, negotiation and dispute.

A further line of research concerns inhabiting the city and its transformations. Approaching people with migrant backgrounds as inhabitants rather than as “foreigners”, she has explored settlement strategies, economies and uses of public space in the cities of eastern Sicily as practices capable of producing belonging, conflict and participation. In Catania’s historic markets, areas exposed to flood and inundation risk, she interrogates processes of touristification and urban regeneration as drivers of the reconfiguration of places, social relations and practices of care. More recently, she has extended this perspective to the housing experience of university students living away from home, at the intersection of the right to education, services and everyday life.

In recent years water has become a privileged vantage point where the anthropology of risk and the anthropology of heritage converge. Her research examines how risk-management apparatuses and processes of heritagization tend to weaken the relational dimension of water, eroding local knowledges and “cultures of use”.

A parallel line of work concerns mental health and the archives of psychic suffering, explored as a field for public anthropology. Running through all these strands is a reflection on the ethnographer’s positionality and on the public and applied uses of the discipline.

She combines her research with extensive engagement in public anthropology: she has led school workshops on environmental risk and participatory neighbourhood mapping, as well as participatory processes on air quality; she takes part in public events and book presentations with local associations, movements and cultural organisations; and she has curated public outreach initiatives such as the webinar series Speakers’ Corner Society during the pandemic and workshops on archives and podcasting.

She is the author of the monograph Smottamenti. Disastri, politiche pubbliche e cambiamento sociale in un comune siciliano (CISU, 2017) and of numerous articles in scientific journals and edited volumes. She sits on the editorial boards of Antropologia Pubblica, where she is responsible for the Forum section, and Humanities. She is a member of the Italian Society of Applied Anthropology (SIAA) and the Italian Society of Cultural Anthropology (SIAC).