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 how racial-colonial inequality is spatialised and resisted in Bogotá. Based on multi-sited ethnography across multiple districts of the city, this work critiques colourblind approaches to inequality in Latin American cities and highlights how racial capitalism and coloniality reframe inequality, in both urban governance and discourse. Her work 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 RACE.ED and the Colombian newspaper La Silla Vacía, the international and multi-lingual network In War’s Wake, and public art exhibitions in Bogotá curated with grassroots collectives and internally displaced residents. Giulia is now developing two articles and a monograph toward a critical urban theory of racial capitalism from Latin American perspectives, in dialogue with scholars and activists in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil.
Her recent work extends to digital urban infrastructures and digital research methods. As part of Amnesty International’s research enquiry “Decode Surveillance” (led by Dr. Matt Mahmoudi), she co-produced reports, interactive digital counter-maps, and an international campaign (covered by Forbes, The Guardian, MIT Tech Review, and ABC News, among others) on urban infrastructures of digital surveillance in New York City, showing how they disproportionately affect urban communities along racial lines and hinder the democratic use of public space.
Giulia’s research has received grants and awards by the British Academy, the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), Santander, Kettle’s Yard, and the Society of Latin American Studies, as well as the University of Cambridge and King’s College London. She has worked as researcher, consultant, architect and urban designer for international, national, and grassroot organisations in Colombia, Italy, Benin, the USA, and the UK.
Giulia is part of the Urban Sociology cluster.