Cristina Grasseni works on several connected topics in economic, political and visual anthropology. Her latest book, The Heritage Arena (2017) unravels the political agency of heritage cheese in the reinvention of local economies and ecology in the Alps. Beyond Alternative Food Networks (2013) analysed Italy’s solidarity economy networks as ethnographic models of grassroots transition to sustainable consumption and food sovereignty.
Grasseni’s comparative ethnography of Solidarity Economies in Italy and Massachusetts was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (2013-2014). She is known for the ‘Skilled Visions’ approach to visual ethnography and was Logie Fellow and Film Study Center Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University (2011/12).
Visiting Scholar at Harvard Anthropology Department (2012-14), she is co-founder of CORES LAB (Research Group on Networks and Practices of Sustainable Economy).
Among her other works: Developing Skill, Developing Vision. Practices of Locality in an Alpine Community (2009, rev. and transl. from Lo sguardo della mano, 2003); Skilled Visions. Between Apprenticeship and Standards (ed., 2007). In Italian: The monographs Luoghi Comuni. (2009), La Reinvenzione del Cibo (2007) and Pratiche e Cognizione (2004, with F. Ronzon) and the Italian translation of Tim Ingold’s Ecologia della Cultura (2001) with F. Ronzon.
Grasseni received her BA in Philosophy, MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science, and PhD in Social Anthropology with Visual Media from the universities of Pavia, Cambridge and Manchester.
