Valentina Zagaria

Valentina Zagaria is an ethnographer of borders, migration, and social change in North Africa and the Mediterranean. She is a Leverhulme Research Fellow with the Anthropology Department at the University of Manchester, and an Affiliated Researcher with the IRMC in Tunis. For her latest project she carried out collaborative research with young people in Tunis involving building a boat and devising a performance on the themes of fun, knowledge exchange, and projections related to the sea. She was awarded a PhD in Anthropology from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2020, which she is turning into a book. Based on extensive fieldwork in southeastern Tunisia, this ethnography explores the concepts of dignity and social death as drives of both revolutionary and migratory movements in the country. Between 2020 and 2022 she also carried out research with Libyan women engaging in civil society work related to their country from neighbouring Tunisia as a Post-doctoral Fellow at the Central European University (CEU) in Vienna. She has published in a range of academic and journalistic venues, including The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, American Behavioral Scientist, openDemocracy, AllegraLab and Border Criminologies. She is the co-president of the Migreurop Network and regularly collaborates with activist and artist collectives across the Mediterranean.