Pietro is a researcher and practitioner of agroecology, whose research intersects science & technology studies and political ecology, with interests in ontological politics and transdisciplinarity.
His PhD focuses on the practices and imaginaries of soil repair and re-mediations in Soil-Food-Web approaches that are experimenting ways to transform the technoscientific infrastructure of the Long Green Revolution. His lines of inquiry explore the limits and possibilities of soil transformations through compost, sensitising (non-)scalability and experimentality. More specifically, he looks at how practitioners and scientists shifting from agri-chemistry to soil microbiology are re-engaging soil as a compound of living microorganisms rather than a container of minerals.
Pietro is devising a participatory action research project with the collective start-up Radici Connesse, and jointly with the peasant brewery Fermenti Sociali, based in the organic farm Cà Battisini in the low mountain region south of Bologna, Italy, attending to the alternative food network of Campi Aperti. His PhD research is a single case-study exploring the ontological politics of soil re-mediations, from the level of the rhizosphere, to the farm-level, as well as through local and trans-local initiatives or networks.
Before joining COSMOS for his PhD at Scuola Normale Superiore, he earned an M.A. in Transcultural Studies from the University of Heidelberg and a B.A. in Development Studies & History from SOAS (University of London). He also trained in performing arts and worked as a shepherd in the Alps. He co-edits the blog and independent journal Epidemia.

Research interests: agroecology; compost: technoscience; soil-food-web; ecological reparation; experimental practice; non-scalability; experimentality; transdisciplinarity;