Giulia’s research straddles sociology, human geography, ethnography, urban design and governance. She is interested in the contested spatial politics of inhabiting and producing the urban, especially in connection to human mobility, urban inequality, spatial agency, and urban infrastructures and governance.
She is Principal Investigator of a British Academy project (2022–25) on global displacement, racialisation, informal migrant settlements, and agro-industrial labour in Europe’s South. The project bridges theories of racial capitalism, the Black Mediterranean, and extended rural-urban worlds, with an empirical focus on Southern Italy and the Central Mediterranean. Early findings have appeared in the South Atlantic Quarterly, the Urban Political Podcast, and Dialogues in Human Geography, with further articles and a comics under review.
A second stream explores spatial inequality in Bogotá, Colombia. Based on ethnographic research, and qualitative spatial and policy analysis, this work critiques colourblind approaches to inequality in Latin American cities and highlights how racial capitalism and coloniality reframe spatial injustice, in both urban governance and discourse. The research also foregrounds social infrastructures, grassroots care, and relational city-making as spatial resistance against extraction and displacement. Outputs from this stream include articles in Identities, the Journal of Latin American Studies, and Social and Cultural Geography, op-eds in English and Spanish, the international network In War’s Wake, and public art exhibitions in Bogotá curated with grassroots collectives and internally displaced residents. She is currently extending this project into developing a critical urban theory of racial capitalism from Latin American perspectives, also in dialogue with scholars and activists in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil.
Her work on migration, racialisation, and urbanisation extends to the digital. As part of Amnesty International’s “Decode Surveillance” research enquiry, she co-produced interactive counter-maps (covered by Forbes, The Guardian, MIT Tech Review, and ABC News, among others) of racialised digital surveillance in New York City.
Her research has received grants and awards by institutions like the British Academy, the Arts & Humanities Research Council, Kettle’s Yard, and the Society of Latin American Studies, as well as Peterhouse and King’s College at the University of Cambridge.
Giulia is part of the Urban Sociology cluster.