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 doctoral research focuses on community agriculture in Italy, that is, grassroots processes of food commoning. She focuses on the political dimensions and transformative potential of these experiences to redesign proximal food systems from below. Her methodologies are inspired by Participatory Action Research and involve the co-creation of empirical results together and for local farmers’ communities. Other academic interests cover political ecology and environmental history, processual analysis, qualitative and innovative techniques of social research. She has published on feminist activism within neoliberal academia, migrant farmworkers in tomato supply chains, and ecoprecarity at the intersection of ecological and work struggles.

Research interests: social movements, food and agricolture, commons, processual sociology, and participatory methdologies