Cristiana Giordano is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UC Davis. She works on foreign migration, mental health, and cultural translation in contemporary Italy. Her research addresses the politics of migration in Europe, issues of citizenship, and practices of recognition. She is the author of Migrants in Translation. Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy (University of California Press, 2014).
My first project focused on politics of migration in Europe through the lens of ethno-psychiatry and its radical critique of psychiatric, legal, and moral categories of recognition of foreign others. My current research focuses on issues of migrant health in Europe through the lenses of scientific research on the microbial flora of new comers aimed at monitoring selected cohorts of migrants to understand the health challenges they may go through during their integration in the European society. I am also engaged in finding new forms of ethnographic writing through theater devices. I am currently writing a play on the current European “refugee crisis” and the different temporalities of care and “emergency.”
