Graduate Student Conference 2026

Evaluation Committee

• Sara De Simone
• Georgios Glouftsios
• Michele Nicoletti
• Giacomo Pallante - Chairman
• Paolo Rosa

Programme

14:00–14:30 – Clarissa Baglieri

Title: The Benefits and Costs of Solar PV Investments for Decarbonisation in Europe: a Spatially-explicit Environmental, Economic and Governance Analysis.
Supervisor: Michela Faccioli; Co-supervisor: Giacomo Pallante

Abstract:

The rapid expansion of utility-scale solar photovoltaic (PV) capacity is central to European decarbonisation, yet it reorganises land, ecosystems and the services on which local livelihoods depend. Electricity markets price a kilowatt-hour identically wherever it is generated, while the ecological costs of siting are spatially specific and largely unpriced. This thesis asks whether the economic benefits of decarbonisation achieved through investments in utility-scale solar PV outweigh the economic costs of the ecological change associated with the construction of these plants, how this balance varies across space and governance settings, and how it is distributed among affected groups. The research integrates satellite-derived, plant-level PV inventories covering 2000–2026 with SEEA-aligned ecological-economic data in ARIES, and with multilevel governance data for Italy, Germany, France and Spain. Treating each plant's commissioning year as a dated territorial intervention supports before-and-after accounts from plant to national scale. A case study analysis conducted in Extremadura illustrates the methodology proposed. 

14:30–15:00 – Rebecca Bonechi

Title: More than One World An Onto-Epistemological Comparative Ethnography of Lithium Conflicts in Northern Argentina and Serbia
Supervisor: Louisa Parks; Co-supervisor: Jens Woelk

Abstract

Addressing the climate crisis has increased large-scale extraction of critical minerals, particularly lithium, as a key component of decarbonisation. Critical scholarship in political ecology and environmental justice has documented the material, social and epistemic injustices of its extraction – a paradox of a green transition that reproduces the very harms it claims to redress. However, this critique has often remained within an epistemological register that pluralises perspectives on a shared reality, leaving the ontological assumptions of that shared reality largely unquestioned. This research addresses this gap through a comparative ethnography of two socio-environmental conflicts over lithium extraction – in Salinas Grandes (Northern Argentina) and Serbia's Jadar Valley – held within a decolonial framework and an onto-epistemological analytic that treats ontological and epistemological registers as mutually constitutive dimensions of how realities are enacted, known, and acted upon. The inquiry asks which onto-epistemologies are enacted in the two conflicts, what becomes legible in their dialogue, and how their persistence renders visible the hegemonic Western onto-epistemology that would otherwise operate as the unquestioned ground of the green extractive project. Read from this perspective, socio-environmental conflicts over lithium extraction emerge as struggles over what world is allowed to be real and worthy of representation, and as privileged sites to expose the roots of the crisis – calling for a politics that opens the space for a pluriverse in which diverse world-making practices can be recognised as legitimate participants in decisions about the planetary future.
 

15:00–15:30 – Dafne Carletti

Title: On Freedom-Living. Abolition Geographies of Prison Resistance Under Authoritarianism

Supervisor: Anna Casaglia; Co-supervisor: Georgios Glouftsios

Abstract

“How do we protect our children’s bodies from the legacy of prisons? The solution starts with release [of detainees], but must end with an imaginative vision for the erasure of prisons, not prisoners,” wrote long-time Egyptian prisoner Alaa Abd el-Fattah in 2019. This PhD project takes up that imaginative work, asking what alternative ways of living together are made possible by prison resistance. While prisons are sustained by a carceral logic based on the domestication of subjects, I argue that practices of prison resistance generate spaces of reciprocity and mutuality within and beyond that domestication. The project aims to unveil these spaces, understand how they are shaped and sustained by resistance, and how they are imperiled by the carceral apparatus.
The project focuses on practices of prison resistance in contexts of high authoritarianism, specifically Egypt and Palestine. This is, first, to move beyond the mainstream discourse on prison resistance and alternative space-making, which is deeply rooted in the US and Europe. Second, to examine the particular dynamics that emerge where the outside of the prison is itself a bigger prison. I define this as two-tier carcerality, which I will investigate through the perspective of diasporas, hence generating three intertwined scales of analysis: the prison, the authoritarian surrounding, and the diasporic space. Accordingly, the project asks how practices of prison resistance shape counter-spaces of co/existence under acute authoritarianism, and how the continuation of that resistance in diasporic exile affects the broader struggle against carcerality. Together, these levels illuminate a constellation of freedom spaces spanning carcerality and resistance across borders, showing how spaces of discipline and captivity can be transformed into spaces of freedom.
Since fieldwork around prisons in Egypt and Palestine would be likely unfeasible, the empirical research will proceed through diasporas in Italy, Germany, and the UK, conducting life-story interviews with diaspora members, correspondence with Palestinian prisoners held in Italy, and cinefora – film screenings and discussions – organized in Rome, Berlin, and London. The multifaceted proliferation of carcerality and its violent logic can only be countered by shaping spaces in which to creatively imagine new ways of living together, even under the most dehumanizing conditions.

16:00–16:30 – Giovanni Luca Catucci

Title: Si vis pacem, para bellum: how can the possibility of future war come to organize the peacetime present?
Supervisor: Alessandra Russo; Co-supervisor: Anna Casaglia

Abstract

Since 2014, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has altered the European security environment and has shifted attention towards the possibility of large-scale interstate war in Europe. While much of this preparation concerns armed forces and defense capabilities, contemporary defense planning also assigns new relevance to civilian infrastructures, public administrations, healthcare, industry and other areas of social organization, under the label of war preparedness. Therefore, domestic institutional, spatial, and social relations are being presently re-organized around war-related requirements in anticipation of a possible future war. This raises a puzzle: how can a war that has not yet occurred nevertheless become so consequential for the organization of civilian life in peacetime? As it appears, war does not have to exist as an actual condition for its possibility to organize life in the present.
Existing scholarship provides important resources for addressing this puzzle. Critical War Studies examines the relationship between war and society; Critical Military Studies traces processes of militarization; research on anticipatory governance shows how uncertain futures become actionable in the present; and recent work on whole-of-society defense examines the growing involvement of civilian capacities in defense planning. Yet less is known about the processes through which requirements associated with preparing for future interstate war acquire concrete form within civilian domains.
This project therefore asks: how does the anticipated possibility of interstate war come to shape peacetime civilian organization in contemporary France and Italy? The project answers this question through a qualitative, comparative, and interpretive design reconstructing selected processes between 2014 and 2026 and using documentary research and semi-structured interviews. Theoretically, the research approaches preparation for war as a process through which the possibility of future conflict becomes actionable in the present. Empirically, the analysis will trace how future war is constituted as a present problem, how war-related requirements enter civilian domains, how actors negotiate and translate them, and what organizational consequences follow or fail to follow. Ultimately, the project seeks to contribute to critical scholarship by specifying the processes through which the anticipation and preparation of future war may acquire civilian institutional form, while remaining open to the possibility that such processes produce uneven, contested or limited transformations.
 

16:30–17:00 – Camilla Tuan

Title: Nuclear, But Not Like That. The Politics of Nuclear Latency
Supervisor: Paolo Foradori; Co-supervisor: Alessandra Russo

Abstract

A state either has nuclear weapons, or it does not. Technical nuclear capabilities are measured, compared, and used to infer what states can do and where they stand in relation to the nuclear order. But the same nuclear-relevant capability can be read as evidence of restraint by one audience and latent weapons potential by another. The material capability remains unmodified: what changes is what it is made to mean.
This creates a problem for how nuclear latency is understood. Commonly treated as a technology-dependent condition identifiable through enrichment, reprocessing, and related infrastructure, latency occupies an ambiguous space where material capability does not settle its political status. This project therefore asks: How does the possession of nuclear-latent capability come to have different political meanings within the non-proliferation order, in Japan and South Korea?
The project approaches this question by examining how material capability acquires political meaning through discourse and audiences. The same capability may be articulated differently depending on the audiences it addresses, and these constructions can be justified, contested, or reproduced. Some may become sufficiently stabilized to function as taken-for-granted understandings of legitimate nuclear behaviour. The project examines this process comparatively in Japan and South Korea, both advanced non-nuclear-weapon states and U.S. allies with nuclear-latent capabilities, but with different trajectories in their nuclear discourses. Using interpretive comparative discourse analysis of official and expert discourse from 2015 onward, supplemented by elite interviews, the project traces how latency is articulated across domestic, alliance, regional, and international audiences.
The project contributes to non-proliferation studies by distinguishing nuclear capability from its political articulation and showing how the meaning of latency is relationally constituted. Going beyond a treatment of nuclear latency as a technical or strategic condition, the project conceives it as an ongoing political argument over what a nuclear capability means, what it permits, and what can be made legitimate or normalized in the broader non-proliferation regime.

Zoom link (for remote participation): Join via Zoom
Meeting ID: 995 2676 7035
Passcode: 513756