Irina is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore and member of the Center of Social Movement Studies (COSMOS). She holds a BA in International Relations and Diplomatic Affairs at the Faculty of Political Science of the University of Bologna – Forlì Campus and a MA in Culture Communication and Globalisation at Aalborg University (DK) where she specialised in International Migrations and Ethnic Relations (IMER) and Global Gender Studies (GGS).

Her research interest is currently focused on the practices of illicit intermediation of labour within the Italian agricultural sector. She is investigating the historical roots and structural causes of the caporalato system in a longitudinal perspective of analysis. Specifically, her PhD project bridges the study of the historical evolution of popular repertoires of contention within peasant communities to the contemporary development of collective projects of agroecological production managed by local social movements in Southern Italy.

Research interests: social movements, migration, gender, popular contention, and peasant movements