PhD Supervisor & 2nd Reader: Dennis Rodgers and Graziella Moraes Dias Da Silva
Expected completion date: 2023-2024
Chiara Feliciani is an anthropologist with a background in media studies, of Italian origin but has lived all across Europe and worked in the rural Peruvian Andes for a year. Both her MA fieldwork as well as her current research has taken place in stigmatised and marginalised areas of big cities in the South of Italy. Her interest lies in adopting a post-colonial lens in assessing the family histories, personal trajectories and hopes for the future of those living and growing up in these urban spaces. A particular interest is also placed on how media and cultural productions also inform these contexts, relevant particularly to the overtly represented city of Naples, where the fieldwork of her current project has taken place. She uses the psychosocial lense of "social suffering" to understand forms of resilience, including new emerging religious practices such as pentecostalism, that emerge in a context where class consciousness is observed as declining. She believes in the power of understanding personal issues collectively, which has nurtured her interest in the practice of dialogue circles amongst women of her field, to support them in a reflection of the structural conditions that impact their personal suffering. Her ultimate aspiration as a researcher is to incorporate her interest in the therapeutic power of collective music making in her work.
Country of origin: Italy
Research Experience
Research Assistant at the Graduate Institute in the ERC project 'Gangs, Gangsters and Ganglands: Towards a Global Comparative Ethnography'