Access to water and its distribution are increasingly associated to conflict, competition and insecurity. As a political scientist I am interested in exploring spaces and practices of collaboration under these challenging circumstances. My research focuses on the role of culture - media, religion, nationalism, knowledge production... - and political organisations like the state or social movements, in facilitating or disrupting such forms of collaboration.
I am currently coordinating an action research project with journalists and researchers on the role of media and science communication in water conflicts and cooperation in the Nile, Brahmaputra and Lake Chad basins. I am also interested in interdisciplinary research and visual methods as a form of collaboration between and beyond disciplines. Since my Master thesis I have been doing research on the human right to water, and later I have been studying social movements against water privatisation in Italy. For my doctoral and post doctoral research I have studied the developmental state and the Pentecostal movement in Ethiopia, where I used to live and work for several years.
At IHE Delft I am the Coordinator of the MSc program in Water Management and Governance. I also coordinate the module "Leadership and collaboration for sanitation change" in the MSc Sanitation program, as well as the summer course Visual methods for water communication. I also teach and supervise students of the Master in Cultural Anthropology and Sustainable Citizenship of the University of Utrecht, as well as of the Master in International Development of the University of Amsterdam.
Committed to public engagement and crossover projects, and enjoying the collaboration with artists, photographers and journalists, I host the podcasts “The Sources of the Nile”, “Water Alternatives Podcast”, and "Si dice acqua". I am the editor of IHE Delft Water Governance Blog, FLOWs.
I am one of the members of IHE Delft Research Ethics Committee.
Beside academic work, I have more than ten years experience in international development cooperation, working both long term and consultancy positions for bilateral agencies (Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), multilateral institutions (UN Habitat), local authorities and international NGOs, in Africa (Ethiopia, South-Sudan, Kenya-Somalia and Morocco), Serbia and Myanmar.
Publications
A complete list of publications can be found in ORCID.