Giulia Torino

My research seeks to advance theoretical and empirical knowledge in the understanding of the politics of space in urban pasts-presents-futures, with particular attention to:

(i) global human movement, place, and displacement;

(ii) race, racial capitalism, difference, and social justice;

(iii) popular, feminist, decolonial, and anti-racist spatial re-imaginations.

I am an interdisciplinary researcher working across urban, social and cultural geography, with a background in architecture and urban design, philosophy, cultural studies, and editorial work. Prior to joining King’s in September 2023, I was a stipendiary Junior Research Fellow at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge (2021–23), a Teaching Associate as the Centre for Latin American Studies (2021-23), and a Visiting Researcher in Cultural and Afro-Latin American Studies at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá (2018-19).

Broadly, my research is concerned with critical spatial questions of power and inequality, at the intersection of global human movement, borders, surveillance, race-making, displacement, and spatial agency, with particular attention being paid to urban and extended urban-rural margins.

I work with critical, feminist, and anti-racist ethnographic methodologies that involve long-term, multi-sited, and multi-lingual fieldwork in collaboration with community leaders, activists, artists, and scholars. I have used English, Spanish (Latin America) and Italian in my research, all of which I speak fluently. I have also working knowledge of French and Portuguese, and I recently started studying Japanese. Alongside my academic work, I have ten years of experience working as researcher, consultant, and designer for international, national, and grassroot organisations, especially in Colombia, Benin, Italy, the USA, and the UK. 

Grants and awards I received to fund my research have included the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UKRI), the Santander Fund, King's College (University of Cambridge), Kettle’s Yard, and the Society of Latin American Studies.

My research seeks to advance theoretical and empirical knowledge in the understanding of the politics of space in urban presents and futures, with particular attention to

(i) global human movement, place, and displacement;

(ii) race, racial capitalism, difference, and social justice;

(iii) popular, feminist, decolonial, and anti-racist spatial re-imaginations.

So far, I have been exploring these themes in the following research projects:

1) My most recent project, “Extending urbanisation in the Black Mediterranean” (Principal Investigator; British Academy; 2022-25) examines the intersections between extended forms of urbanisation (in global urban-rural frontiers), the spatial politics of migration and border regimes, and the political economy of racial capitalism in the making of new transitory spaces of inhabitation in the Mediterranean, with an initial empirical focus on Southern Italy. Early outputs have featured in the South Atlantic Quarterly, the Urban Political Podcast, and Dialogues in Human Geography.

2) Between 2016-2020 I conducted feminist and multi-sited ethnographic research on the unattended connections between city-making, race-making (mestizaje), coloniality, identity, and citizenship in Latin American cities, especially in Bogotá (Colombia) where I have worked for over a decade. This project intervened in debates regarding uneven power dynamics in city-making, urban and national values/identities, and how Latin American cities are changing between new legal frameworks of ethnic inclusion and long-standing racial-colonial practices of exclusion and violence. Academic outputs from this project include articles on Identities, the Journal of Latin American Studies and Social and Cultural Geography.

3) My third research stream explores questions of social justice and tech infrastructures, with a particular focus on digital surveillance. I have developed this focus in a research project with Amnesty International to produce reports, interactive maps, and an international campaign (covered by Forbes, The Guardian, MIT Tech Review, ABC News) on facial scans in New York City, and addressing questions of the 'right to the city' in digital urban presents and futures. 

4) The fourth stream of my research is based upon community and collective work with activists, artists, and scholars across global urban peripheries, enquiring into spaces of conflict, violence, forced displacement, and the forms of ordinary agency and relational territories that emerge from and against them. With an ethnographic focus on the geographies inhabited by internally displaced women in Bogotá, the project explored and co-produced socially engaged art practices. In particular, the research interrogated how ordinary forms of resistance/re-existence are mobilised politically to negotiate visibility, social healing, radical pedagogies, urban placemaking and, ultimately, social change. Outcomes from this research stream include the creation of the transnational and multi-lingual research network In War’s Wake, two public art exhibitions (Bogotá 2018; Bogotá 2022) with the grassroots popular feminist and anti-racist social organisations Asomujer Y Trabajo and Unión de Costureros.