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Junior Research Fellow in Urban Studies, Department of Geography and Peterhouse Cambridge
Dr Giulia Torino is a Junior Research Fellow at Peterhouse and the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, where she is also a Teaching Associate at the Department of Politics and International Studies. Her research addresses the lived politics of race, conflict, inequality, and spatial justice in Latin America (Colombia) and Europe (Italy; Mediterranean). She has explored these topics through in-depth ethnographic research and mixed-method analyses of segregation and integration, displacement and emplacement, governance and urban policy, urban informality, and collective practices of placemaking.
After completing a degree in Architecture (minor in Philosophy) between the University of Venice and the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Dr Torino worked as an architect in Benin. She then completed a joint Masters’s in Urban Studies between the University of Venice and the University of Sheffield which also involved extensive research in Colombia. She worked in New York City at the Department of City Planning (2015), before returning to academia to pursue an AHRC-funded Ph.D. in Urban Studies (University of Cambridge; 2020), in which she addressed questions of:
- racialisation in and through the urban space,
- colonial legacies in the planning apparatus,
- geographies of internal displacement and migration,
- multicultural urban policy and the limits of civil society engagement and government participation strategies with ethnic urban communities,
through ethnographic research (2017-2019) in Bogotá, Colombia.
After completing her Ph.D., she worked as a Consultant (Researcher) for Amnesty International (2021) to map and analyse racialised digital surveillance in New York City. She then secured a Research Fellowship at Peterhouse (2021-23), University of Cambridge, where she currently conducts postdoctoral research based in Southern Italy on the migration-labour-dwelling nexus in rural-urban informal settlements.
She continues to actively collaborate with grassroots (especially Afro-descendant) community organisations in Colombia, with a particular focus on everyday violence, peace, social and racial justice, and city-making ‘from below.’ She has been an invited lecturer at the Universities of: Cambridge, UCL, Sheffield, ETH Zurich, Basel, Externado Colombia, Venice, among others.
