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Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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Alejandro Ciordia

Research Fellow

Alejandro Ciordia is a postdoctoral researcher at the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence. He is part of the Centre on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS) and is currently working within the European Commission’s Horizon project DEMETRA (“Democratic Governance, Environmental and Climate Challenges, and Societal Transformation: Deliberation, Inclusiveness, and Citizen Empowerment for Sustainable Food Systems”).

His primary research interests lie in political sociology, with a focus on topics such as political polarization, collective action, protest, social movements, and socioecological transition. Methodologically, he specializes in social network analysis and mixed-methods approaches, combining statistical analyses of network patterns with qualitative evidence gathered through interviews and text analyses.

Alejandro earned his PhD in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Trento in 2020, conducting for his dissertation a network-analytic study on the changing patterns of inter-organizational collaboration within the Basque environmental field in the aftermath of violent conflict. From 2021 to 2024, he held a postdoctoral position at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), where he remains an affiliated fellow of the COALESCE Lab (“Laboratory for the Computational Analysis of Egonetworks, Social Cohesion, and Exclusion”). Additionally, he has participated as a research assistant in international research projects at the University of Geneva and the King Juan Carlos University (URJC) and has been a visiting researcher at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) and Utrecht University.

Research interests: environmental and climate activism, repertoires of contention, social cohesion and polarization, social network analysis, and mixed methods

News

Publications

Edited Volume - 2026

Conspiracism and Political Conflict

Manuela Caiani, Marco Solinas, Hans-Jorg Trenz

Monograph - 2025

Free download for "Contentious Politics of Global Health Movements"

Donatella Della Porta, Stella Christou

Journal Article - 2025

Communication creates partial organization: A comparative analysis of the organizing practices of two climate action movements, Youth for Climate and Fridays for Future Italy

Marco Deseriis, Lorenzo Zamponi, Diego Ceccobelli
This article focuses on a neglected aspect of the climate action movement Fridays for Future, namely, the relationship between its mediated communication practices and its early organizational processes. Drawing from a strand of organizational communication that underscores the constitutive dimension of communication to organizing processes, we analyze the significance of mediatized leadership and networked communication for the foundation and early development of two national chapters of Fridays for Future: Youth for Climate (YFC) Belgium and Fridays for Future Italy (FFFI).

Journal Article - 2025

Power resources, territory and labour conflicts in the logistic sector

Donatella Della Porta, Marco Antonelli