Short Biography

Letizia earned her PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Manchester in 2019. Her doctoral work, titled "Pharmaceutical Redemption: Reconfigurations of Care in Austerity-laden Athens," looked at the emergence of grassroots medical facilities during the peak of the 2009 economic crisis. Since completing her PhD, she has held teaching and research posts at various British academic institutions. In 2020, she received the ESRC Post-doctoral Fellowship (SeNSS University of Kent) to carry out her project "Care under Austerity," which examined how, during the Greek economic crisis, regimes of care were being reorganised along kinship and gender lines in the face of a collapsing welfare state. Before joining the University of Vienna, she held a temporary lectureship in Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, where she taught the BA/MA module "Anthropology of Pharmaceuticals," drawing on her PhD thesis and the latest works in Graphic Anthropology. Furthermore, Letizia has played an active role in the ongoing conversation around multimodal and graphic anthropologies and has extensively published on the epistemological and methodological affordances of graphic ethnography.

As a recipient of the SEED grant, Letizia will develop her new research project on industrial labor and post-industrial futures in Taranto (Italy) and Galati (Romania). Both at the margins of Europe and their respective states, since the 1960s Taranto and Galati have hosted the biggest and most polluting steel plants in Europe. Her project, tentatively titled "Steel Life," aims to understand the tensions between environmental and labor struggles through the lens of social reproduction, thus bringing a feminist perspective into current debates around industrial labor.