I am a researcher in cultural anthropology with a PhD in Urban Planning, primarily interested in the social effects of urban displacement. I was affiliated to the Department of Geography at the University of Leicester, where I developed my postdoctoral research project in partnership with Harvard's Department of Anthropology. I recently worked on the cultural impacts of gentrification in Casablanca, Morocco, and on the Gnawa subculture; my main fieldwork research project in the neighborhood of Bon Pastor, Barcelona, where massive demolitions and evictions have taken place since 2007, and as a result I wrote the ethnographic monograph La ciudad horizontal (in Spanish, Catalan, Italian). This book was the result of an independent research, financed by a Catalan institute for ethnographic heritage. I subsequently enrolled in a PhD in urban studies, that allowed me to work on evictions and resistance in the Roman suburb of Ostia: I wrote the book Il diritto di restare (Carocci, 2024) as the result of such research. Previously I had worked in independent and NGO-promoted research projects in Nicaragua, Kenya, Tunis, Cambodia, Nepal, Morocco, Spain, Italy. I was one of the organizers of Repensar Bonpastor, a collaborative experiment to contrast evictions in a Barcelona neighborhood, I am co-founder of the working groups Perifèries Urbanes and Observatori d'Antropologia del Conflicte urbà; also a member of the Società Italiana di Antropologia Applicata, of the ESCAPE working group on migrations, of the International Network for Urban Research and Action (INURA), and of the editorial board of the Italian news website Napoli Monitor and of the journal Lo stato delle città.
Supervisors:Loretta Lees, Michael Herzfeld, and Manuel Delgado
Address:https://bulldozerstate.github.io/in/stefano-portelli/
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