Maria Chiara Franceschelli is a doctoral researcher in Political Science and Sociology at the Scuola Normale Superiore, and a member of the Center on Social Movement Studies (COSMOS).

Her research interests roam in the field of political sociology. She specialises in environmental governance and civil society, paying particular attention to participation, dissent, and repression. Her doctoral project focuses on civil society and contentious participation in contemporary Russia. She investigates the relations between centre-periphery relations, environmental governance, and grassroots participation under an authoritarian regime, exploring grassroot mobilisations in “peripheral” regions of Russia. Her research is supervised by Prof. Andrea Pirro and Prof. Donatella della Porta.

Maria Chiara holds a MA cum laude in Comparative Politics of Eurasia from the Higher School of Economics in Saint Petersburg, and a BA in Intercultural and Linguistic Mediation from the University of Bologna. During her doctoral programme, she held visiting positions at the Freie Universitaet Berlin’s Osteuropa-Institut and at the University of Tartu’s Johan Skytte Institute for Political Studies.

Maria Chiara believes in universal access to specialised knowledge and consistently engages in dissemination of academic research to the general audience. She regularly works as a contributor for media outlets and think-tanks, and has multi-year experience in the publishing industry. She is the co-author, with Federico Varese, of La Russia che si ribella. Repressione e opposizione nel Paese di Putin, Altreconomia Edizioni (2024)

Research interests: civil society, social movements, environmental governance, centre-periphery relations, and contentious mobilisation