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Cosmos

The Centre on Social Movement Studies

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Marco Deseriis

Faculty

Marco Deseriis is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences at the Scuola Normale Superiore. His research combines critical perspectives in media studies, cultural studies, democratic theory and social movement studies to explore cultural and political dimensions of Internet-based activism and emerging forms of political organization in the network society. More specifically, his current research focuses on the political values embedded in the design of digital platforms and AI systems, and the impact of such values on democratic participation, political representation, and the organization of political parties and social movements.

Prof. Deseriis has published the monographs Piattaforme e Parteciapzione Politica (Mondadori, 2024), Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous (University of Minnesota Press, 2015), and Net.Art: L’arte della Connessione (Shake Edizioni, 2008, co-authored with Giuseppe Marano). He has also published articles in leading international journals in media and communication studies, including New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society, Theory, Culture & Society, International Journal of Communication, the Journal of Communication Inquiry, and Science, Technology & Human Values, among others.

Marco won prestigious grants such as the European Commission’s Marie Curie Individual Fellowship for the research project Scalable Democracy, which he conducted at the Scuola Normale Superiore in 2016-18, and the Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in Transnational Media, which he received from Eugene Lang College The New School of New York in 2011-12.

Before joining the Scuola Normale, he was an assistant professor in the Program of Media and Screen Studies at Northeastern University, Boston. He holds a Phd from New York University (2011).

Research interests: Digital democracy, technopolitics, hacktivism, social movement media, and movement parties

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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