Biography
Dr Giulia Torino is an urban theorist, ethnographer, teacher, and architect researching new regimes of inhabitation in the context of global displacements under racial capitalism and (neo-)coloniality, urban conflict and violence, with a focus on Latin America (especially Colombia) and the Mediterranean (especially Southern Italy). She is currently Junior Research Fellow at Peterhouse College, Affiliated Lecturer in the Department of Geography, and Guest Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies. She has worked for NGOs in Benin, at the New York City Department of City Planning, and as consultant for Amnesty International. She has collaborated with feminist organisations of Colombian IDPs and Afro-descendant activist organisations working towards racial justice in Colombia.
Research
In my postdoctoral research, I explore the nexus between space, place, race, (neo-)coloniality, and dis/possession in the Urban South from the conceptual framework and geographical space of the 'Black Mediterranean'. In particular, I focus on new plantation regimes in Southern Italy, global displacements through the Mediterranean Sea under racial capitalism, and new regimes of inhabitation that are stemming from them.
My PhD research was concerned with emerging racial geographies and relational forms of urban collective life connected to the internal displacement of increasingly higher numbers of Afro-Colombians to cities. In particular, through a situated ethnographic study carried out in Bogotá between 2017 and 2019, my research shed light on the hidden racial geographies of the city and, simultaneously, on new territorial practices based upon Afro-descendant mutuality and radical togetherness that are stemming amidst and in spite of the sustained precarity that affects B/black life in Latin American cities. I continue to work on these themes to date and to collaborate with social organisations and collectives in Latin America.
