My research interests lie at the junction of the two macro areas of Science, Society & Technology Studies and Space, Society & the Environment. My works can be mainly ascribed to the Critical Geography domain, but I firmly believe in the power of transdisciplinary research as the only able to produce transformative action.
I’m interested in innovative modes of geographical production, planning and governance performed by heterogeneous, multilayered and multiscalar networks. Notably, I wonder how these networks assemble and negotiate socio-environmental issues, and how the material and semiotic implications of their agency is brought to the public fore.
Research approach and methods for qualitative social research include: Citizen Science and Participatory Processes; Social Construction of Technology (SCOT); Sociotechnical Imaginary and Discourse Analysis; Participatory (Action) research; Actor-Network Theory/ Material Semiotic and Scenario Building.
I conduct – or have conducted- research on the following topics:
1. Critical geography of the Ocean
In contamination with Critical Ocean Studies, Marine Social Science, Marine Citizen Science my research focuses on three lines:
- radically participatory (i.e. relying on the tacit knowledge of the locals) knowledge creation and sharing (notably citizens’ science practices) for marine social science;
- the relationship between society and the sea, in terms of ocean literacy and commitment to sustainable behaviours (in and out of the sea), notably by investigating the cultural territorialisation of the oceans (i.e. the process of symbolic attribution of meaning to different marine spaces) as a means for tightening society’s emotional attachment to the marine environment; and on
- the adoption the Chthulucene perspective to describe the process involving underwater life and non-biological materials (a consequence of the anthropic activities) leading to a transformation of the marine environment. I engage with material-semiotic and post-modern theory of natureculture assemblages and the visionary perspective of establishing a tentacular thinking in marine social science to build upon the observation of sympoietic processes occurring in the ocean that involve natural and artificial, human and non-human agents. Notably, pervasive plastic pollution represents a major challenge to the health of oceans and the whole life-supporting systems on Earth.
2. Critical Digital (Participation and Innovation for) Urban Governance
I am interested in understanding how digital and societal technologies interplay in producing innovate participatory processes that cha(lle)nge the traditional forms and function(ing) of urban governance. This entails investigating, amongst the other, the following questions: what novel agents have emerged in the digital age and do they exercise agency in public space? What are the contestations and antagonisms brought about the massive introduction of digital technologies in the urban life? How critical issues of monopolist appropriation and control of infrastructure and power imbalances, opinion polarisation and manipulation, (cyber)control, data-protection and censorship, limitation of freedom and social dissensus pigeonholing, trust and legitimacy are brought to the public fore and addressed via the city governance? Stepping beyond the dichotomy between the post-political technology-optimism of the smart innovation perspective and the positions of the “wisdom of the crowd” discontents, I aim at offering a critical appreciation of the epistemological, geographical and socio-political challenges posed by digital social innovation in line with those prefigured by the “Shared Digital Europe” manifesto.
I name this form of agency as Critical Digital Social Innovation and describe this as:
- Deconstructing the re-production processes of the neoliberal city (instead of perpetuating them);
- Advancing collective agency to answer unsatisfied needs by transforming social institutions (e.g. welfare systems job organization, unsustainable models of consumption…) and political institutions (direct action instead of representative);
- Creatively re-interpreting the political possibilities of intervention in the public space;
- Being performed by heterogeneous and plural constellation of social actors that empower social relationships from the bottom-up;
- Contrasting the material and symbolic commodification of urban (public) space rooting on ideals aspiration for more equal, democratic and sustainable society.
Therefore, critical digital social innovation characterised political agency as a form of performative, instead of discursive, material-semiotic practices endowed with a political value. This is the object of my current research on “the ordinary political” that characterises as a “spatialized political procedure [that] can be made enduring and give content to the equality expressed in the extra-ordinary events in the aftermaths of the insurgencies” (Swyngedow 2014 ).
This research line builds upon my previous work on what I called “spontaneous smartness“. It investigated how different social agents imagine and assemble the city via smart technologies and processes; and how smart configures, engages and empowers (or not) social differences. The research focused on the emergence of spontaneous smartness (i.e. the effect of bottom-up agency of heterogeneous actors deploying the potential of smart processes toward innovative community-oriented initiatives) which addresses different social needs via creative&collective smart solutions; and avoid social differences to turn into inequalities.
3. Urban Political Gardening
For more than 10 years I worked on urban gardening (including allotments, community/collective gardens, guerrilla gardening and street gardening) to establish that (1) even though urban gardens has been seen from some academia as a pimp-your-neighbourhood activity, it actually addresses and affects some of the most striking issues of our time, such as the social and spatial injustice conditions, marginalisation and deprivation; and (2) urban gardening is a first and foremost a socio-political gesture that that is performed via the mobilisation of biological material and the activation of material-semiotic networks in the space of the polis.
4. Postenvironmentalism
In line with the transformation of the political in the post-political age, post-environmentalism has been debated in environmental political theory from the 90s onward and has called for the re-politicisation of the politics of nature, which had been reduced by the global institutions’ mainstream to a matter of general consensus with no effectuality. My research is intended to advance a material semiotic interpretation of post-environmentalism theory and practice by starting from the recognition that the everyday making and unmaking of the world is a political activity which requires the mobilisation of the social, environmental, and techno-scientific dimensions all at once. Here heterogeneous social actors adopt a plurality of (linguistic and non-linguistic) means to exercise political agency by opposing resistance or practising resilience, refusing assigned roles and dissolving or re-shaping social formations in the re-creation of nature, and engaging in the transformation of space via a bodily form of politics.
5. Informal Planning
Urban (social, spatial and political) planning is one of my long-lasting and deeper interests and constituted a file rouge amongst my research on different topics. I started working on planning by digging deep into the hidden rationality of planning, even in cases where only the progressive face of power is apparently involved, to unveil the dark side of planning which is unavoidably present in the form of disciplinary power. Elaborating on Flyvbjerg’s concept of “real rationality” I aimed to show it as the product of biopolitical technologies (disciplining of non-humans further than human life), which makes it possible to control the “uncivilised” instincts of society through urban planning. My preliminary exploration of the constituency of public garden planning in Europe leads me close to the elaboration of the informal planning concept which I conceive not as the climax of the liberatory power of urban counter-culture, nor the consequence of a progressive inclusion of alternative practices in the neoliberal institutional planning practice, rather as the expression of an emerging and transactive/fluid governmentality. Informal planning refers, thus, to collectively organised and structured initiatives aimed at designing the form and functions of public spaces and services in the absence of a legal definition, guidance and funds provided by the public or private sector. This allows the entering of informal actors in institutional planning processes and the redefinition of what is urban, and for whom.
6. Environmental Human Rights and Environmental Conflicts
This research line is intended to investigate and document how far the definition in the 2014 of U.N. “Environmental Human Rights” (which expands the traditional understanding of environmentally relevant HRs focused on substantive rights, with procedural rights, whose violations are likely to both cause or to be caused by environmental harms) has been influence by Political Ecology theory and agency. This last critically deconstructs the mainstream liberal perspective to explain how environmental challenges are permeated with issues of power circulation and social justice; points out the mutual influence of environmental degradation and economic, social and cultural poverty; and offer the theoretical framework for the legitimation and discussion of environmental conflicts. My research aims at clarifying whether and under what condition environmental conflicts can be considered as originated from EHR violation or the inadequate application of procedural EHRs, in situations where state or non-state actors (particularly national or multinational enterprises) are threatening the enjoyment of the substantive component of these very rights.
7. Politics of space and place
In working on this research line I used environmental theory as a conceptual frame to investigate the politics of knowledge at the center of disagreements over the management of space, and to chart the great diversity of opinions over the significance of place identity for different actors involved in preserving, planning, or contesting spatial developments.
8. Post-rural development
Post-rural areas are characterised by social and economic dynamics produced by a large number of heterogeneous actors working on the contestation and re-assertion of local identity and the control over immaterial assets. My research consequently focused on the possibility of governing the complex relationship between stable and transient actors and the multiple tensions (e.g. resident vs. tourists, local vs. global, real vs. virtual, ancient vs. postmodern, tradition vs. innovation) these generate. The use of dedicated processes for creating “listening territories” able to integrate local planning and management strategies has been also explored.
Professional affiliations
2023 (Jul) – today Affiliate Professor, Interdisciplinary Center for Sustainability and Climate, Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies, Pisa, Italy
2022 (Oct)- today Alumna, Institute for Advanced Studies – Science Technology and Society Unit, TU Graz, Austria
2017 (Jun) – 2023 (Jun) Affiliate Professor, Institute of Management, Sant’Anna School, Pisa, Italy
2020 (Oct)-2021 (Sett) Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies on Science, Technology and Society Unit (IAS-STS), Graz, Austria
2019 (Jun) – 2025 (May) Research Affiliate (Voluntary Post-doc Fellow, 5% time), Center for Sustainable Development (CDO), Dep. Political Science, Ghent University, Belgium
2014 – today Senior Research Fellow, Earth System Governance Research Network, currently at Utrecht University, Netherlands
2012 – today Alumna, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU, Munich, Germany
2017- External collaborator, Responsible Management Research Center- REMARC, Dep. Economics and Management, University of Pisa, Italy
Dec 2018 – Dec 2020 Honorary Research Associate, School of Engineering, The University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand
2015 – 2017 Affiliate Fellow, OpenSpace Research Centre. Centre for Geographical and Environmental Research, The Open University, Milton Keynes, UK
Memberships
2023 Member of the American Association of Geographers
2023 Member of the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography
2022- Member of the Ocean Decade’s Global Stakeholder Forum, U.N. (Ocean Decade Art-Science Networking Group; Coastal Ecosystem and Community Resilience Group)
2022- Member of the Marine Social Science, Italy Network
2022- Member of Rete Università Sostenibili-Cibo, group “Orti Universitari”
2021-2022 Consultant on “World Industry 5.0”, Osservatorio Impresa e Professioni 5.0 – Confassociazioni
2020-today Member of the Energy Communities at UniTO research group
2015; 2020; 2021; 2022 Member of the Società di Studi Geografici SSG
2020-today Member of the Interdepartmental Research Centre on Urban & Event Studies – Omero, University of Turin
2020-today Member of the Earth System Governance taksforce on New Technologies, Earth System Governance Network
2020-today Member of International Geographical Union, Commission “Geography of Governance”
2019-today Project partner of the Forum Disuguaglianze e Diversità
2019-today Member of the Direction Staff of Environmental Justice Italy group
2019- 2020 Scientific collaborator of Research Institute on Territory and Environment Leonardo – IRTA, Pisa
2018- today Member of Sustainability Transition Research Network
2018-today Member of Edgeryders
2017-today Member of Crowdsourcing Week
2018-today Member of International Critical Geographers Group (ICGG)
2018-today Member of AGeI – Associazione dei Geografi Italiani (research group “Geografia dell’ambiente” (Geography and Environment) since 2017; research group “Geografie dell’innovazione e comunicazione” (Geography of innovation and communication) since 2018)
2017- today Member of Marie Curie Alumni Association (working groups: BeNeLux Chapter; Italian Chapter; Events and Network (2017-2019))
2010-2011; 2018-today Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society with IBG (research groups: Geographies of Justice, Participatory Geographies, Political Geography, Urban Geography, Digital Geographies, Planning and Environment Research Group)
2018-today Member of Scientific Committee Legambiente Nazionale
2015 Member Società Geografica Italiana
2015-today Member of the ASud NGO – General Assembly
2011 Member of Société Internationale d’Ethnographie
2009 – 2010 Member of Global Studies Association, UK
2008 – 2011; 2014 – today Consultants for Regional Institute for Economic Planning in Tuscany (IRPET)
2008 Member of AISRE, Italian Regional Science Association
2008 Member of Centro Studi sul Paesaggio, Rome, Italy
2007 – today Member of European Consortium for Political Research – Green Politics Standing Group
2007 Member of Political Studies Association, Global Justice and Human Rights Specialist Group
Chiara Certomà 