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Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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Franca Midori Marquardt

PhD candidate

Franca is an anthropologist and filmmaker, seeking ways to combine visual experiments and research to support change. She holds a Bachelors in visual anthropology from Goldsmiths, university of London and a Masters in Anthropology from the university of Leipzig. As an activist researcher, she is focused on social movements and expressions of solidarity for a good life for all. Franca is active in a Marxist-feminist collective, the degrowth movement, and is an editor of the ethnographic storytelling journal Thirdshelf.

Highlighting the importance of building relation as an anti-capitalist imperative, Franca’s PhD research focuses on how these alliances are created between specific movements in specific places, and what this means for transforming the understanding of democracy, equality and the “good life for all”. As such, it will be concerned with different expressions of revolutionary love and “new” internationalism present in climate justice and eco- feminist movements in Germany and their actions and visions towards radical justice. The aim of the project not only is to understand the multitude of affective and practical relations within the movements but also to co-create a compass for transformation. This includes building the infrastructural and material conditions of a new internationalism while combining the rootedness of political action with a common desire for liberation.

Research interests: ecofeminism, emotions, degrowth, solidarity building, and visual narratives

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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