Cristina Grasseni specialises in economic and multimodal anthropology, researching issues of sustainability and citizenship, (food) heritage and responsible innovation through, amongst others, the reinvention of craft. As PI of the ERC Consolidator grant www.foodcitizens.eu (2017–2024), Grasseni led a team of 8 researchers and research assistants to compare collective food procurement in Gdańsk, Rotterdam and Turin. She is co-editor of the Encyclopaedia of Economic Anthropology (forthcoming for Edward Elgar). For Amsterdam University Press, she is authoring the forthcoming monograph Food Activism and Crisis: An Anthropological Perspective on the Changing Dutch Landscape.

More information about Cristina Grasseni

Skilled Visions and Ecologies of Belonging

Grasseni is known for her ‘Skilled Visions’ approach to visual ethnography (More than visual: The apprenticeship of skilled visions, 2022). In 2011, she was appointed David and Roberta Logie Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study of Harvard University with the project Skilled Vision. Critical Ecologies of Belonging. As Harvard Film Study Center Fellow, she produced the film Christmas in August with Federico de Musso. With seven Leiden colleagues, Grasseni coordinated the co-authored volume Audiovisual and Digital Ethnography: A Practical and Theoretical Guide (2021). Grasseni is founding member in the Editorial Board of AnthroVision.revues.org, the journal of the Visual Anthropology Network of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, and invited member of the Editorial Board of the journal Visual Anthropology. 

ERC Consolidator grant ‘Food citizens?’ 

Grasseni’s ERC Consolidator grant Food citizens? Collective food procurement in European cities: solidarity and diversity, skills and scale (2017-2024) compares the different types, premises and consequences of collective forms of food production, distribution and consumption in three European cities.

Food heritage, food citizenship, and alternative provisioning

The following monographs address the politics of food: The Heritage Arena (2017) focusses on heritage cheese in the Italian Alps, while Beyond Alternative Food Networks (2013) examines Italy's solidarity economy networks as models of grassroots innovation for sustainability. Grasseni’s comparative ethnography of solidarity economy networks in Lombardy (Italy) and Massachusetts (USA) was funded by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (Grant 8643, 2013-2014) while Visiting Scholar at Harvard Anthropology Department (2012-2014). Among other funded projects is the Exploratory Seminar The Reinvention of Food (Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University 2013, with Heather Paxson) and the teaching and research programme Real Cities/Smarter Citizens (Harvard Graduate School of Design and Bergamo University 2013/2014, co-PI).

Grasseni co-founded CORESnet (a research network on Consumption, Networks and Practices of Sustainable Economies), with Francesca Forno, University of Trento, and Silvana Signori, University of Bergamo). CORES’ key research outcome was the first systematic survey of Solidarity Purchase Groups in Lombardy. 

Publications and CV

Grasseni’s  publications include seven monographs, eight special issues in peer-reviewed journals, seven edited volumes, and more than 150 among journal articles, book chapters, and encyclopaedia entries. Among her other works are: Developing Skill, Developing Vision. Practices of Locality in an Alpine Community (2009, revised and translated 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), Pratiche e Cognizione (2004, with Francesco Ronzon) and the Italian curated translation of Tim Ingold's essays Ecologia della Cultura (2001, with Francesco Ronzon).

• For all publications, please consult the List of all publications. 
• Curriculum Vitae of Cristina Grasseni

Activities