Dr. Letizia Bonanno

Letizia earned her Phd in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester in 2019. In her doctoral work, titled Pharmaceutical redemption: reconfigurations of care tin austerity-laden Athens, she looked at the emergence of grassroots medical facilities during the 2009 economic crisis. Since completing her PhD, Letizia has held teaching and research posts at various British university.

She has been awarded the SEED grant to develop her new research project on industrial labour and post-industrial futures in Galați (Romania). She intends to broaden the scope of the project a comparative case study of Taranto (Italy), a rapidly de-industrialising Taranto. Both Galați and Taranto are located at the margins of Europe and their respective states and have hosted the biggest and most polluting steel plants in Europe since the 1960s. Her project, tentatively titled Steel life aims to understand the tensions between environmental and labour struggles through the lens of social reproduction, bringing a more thorough feminist perspective into the current debates around industrial labour. Letizia is currently a Senior Research Fellow affiliated with the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna.