I am a PhD candidate at Scuola Normale Superiore and Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies doing research on corporate power in rural communities in the Global South and the ways these communities resist such power. Using as the starting point the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR), which the mainstream business literature promotes as an alternative in aiding poor regions and elevating people out of poverty, I take a critical stance in the analysis of CSR’s ability to have an inclusive impact on society.

In my work, I also look at the local community side of things and describe the resistance of farmers to the corporate power. By taking ethnographic approach, I aim to make observations of the more routine and day-to-day ways of resistance that are often hidden and not organised through major open movements, but instead take form of slow encroaching change. With this focus I set the goal of developing a theoretical understanding of the complex political relations between individual companies and local communities, how these relations are constructed and how different marginalised groups react differently to corporate actions.

Research interests: power resistance, local institutions, corporate social responsibility, inequality and poverty reduction, the Global South