What do you particularly appreciate about teaching at the Institute?
Teaching at the Geneva Graduate Institute has been one of the most rewarding aspects of my academic career. What I value most is the opportunity to engage with an exceptionally diverse and motivated student body across programmes such as Anthropology and Sociology, MINT, and Executive Education. This diversity continually challenges me to rethink pedagogy and adapt to different intellectual, professional and political contexts. I particularly appreciate the Institute’s openness to interdisciplinary teaching. My courses draw on sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, and philosophy, allowing students to critically evaluate global inequalities while connecting theory to contemporary debates and their own lived experiences. The classroom becomes a space of dialogue, experimentation, and mutual learning, which I find deeply energising.
What projects are you currently working on?
I am currently developing several interconnected research projects focused on inequality, race, and elites. One major line of work, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Network for International Studies (2020–2025), examines how economic and political elites in the Global South understand redistribution in contexts marked by persistent socioeconomic and ethnoracial inequalities. In parallel, I am part of an international collaborative project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation (2023–2027) that explores how ordinary individuals across different national and class contexts engage in everyday discussions about inequality.
I am also developing a new project that brings together my work on ethnoracial inequalities and on elites, with a particular focus on how processes of racialisation are changing at the top of social hierarchies. The project examines how narratives of racism and anti-racism evolve over time, how they are mobilised by elites, and how these shifts reshape political opportunities for addressing inequality. I was recently awarded the Institute’s Seed Money to begin developing this project into a larger grant proposal, which will allow me to refine its conceptual framework and research design.
How has your work evolved over the past few years at the Institute?
Since joining the Institute in 2016, my work has expanded both substantively and institutionally. Research-wise, I have developed more comparative and transnational projects that connect race, elites, redistribution, and democracy across diverse contexts. These projects increasingly combine different methodologies and international collaborations. At the same time, my role has evolved through intensive supervision, editorial responsibilities, and service to the Institute, allowing for a closer integration of research, teaching, and institutional engagement. I am also currently involved in two Geneva-based academic initiatives: the LatinoLab, a research network of scholars working on topics related to Latin America; and the Intermigra Lab which I co-coordinate with Milena Chimienti and Marilene Lieber, bringing together colleagues, students, and practitioners from UNIGE, the Graduate Institute, and HETS to exchange ideas and collaborate on questions of migration, inequality, and social intervention.
How do you see it evolving now that you are a Professor?
As a Professor, I want to continue developing long-term, collaborative research on inequality and democracy, with a strong comparative perspective that keeps the Global South at the centre of the analysis. I also remain deeply committed to teaching and mentoring doctoral students and early-career scholars. Beyond that, I’m very interested in creating more bridges across disciplines, with Local and International Geneva, and with academic communities in the Global South and beyond.
You have been Co-Director of the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy since 2021. What are the Centre’s objectives and how has it developed in recent years?
It has been a great pleasure to co-direct the AHCD with G. Balachandran and Christine Lutringer. In the past four years, we have sought to strengthen the Centre as a hub for interdisciplinary research, dialogue, and public engagement on democracy. Looking ahead, we see the Centre’s next phase as an opportunity to deepen our focus on three closely connected priorities: the relationship between technology, democracy and polarisation; the challenges posed by inequalities in multilevel democratic systems; and the question of youth engagement. What matters to us is approaching these themes in the intersection between research and practice-oriented experimentation. At the heart of this agenda is a concern with how people experience democracy in their everyday lives, and with how we can collectively develop new forms of democratic mobilisation, participation, and trust — especially among younger generations. Our ambition is for the Centre to contribute both to scholarly debates and to the concrete renewal of democratic practices in an increasingly unequal, polarized, and digitally mediated world.