Ilaria Vanni
Biographic Data
| ID | 829789 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ilaria Vanni |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ilaria |
| FAMILY NAME | Vanni |
| SIGNATURE | VANNI I |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Technology Sydney |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2795-8465 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 17 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 26 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 17 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1970 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The Red Frock
In this reflection, I recount my experience supervising a UTS student in Milan during her In-Country Study, where I became a luxury fashion faux buyer as part of her research on luxury shopping. An unexpected encounter in a high-fashion boutique taught me the importance of attentive observation and developing tools to help students make sense of complex global and local interactions. This moment reinforced my appreciation for elevating experience…
Visually Communicating Artificial Urban Wetlands
Introduction Urban wetlands in Australia are under threat, yet they provide benefits for climate change mitigation, pollution reduction, habitat provision, and socioecological connection. In what is now known as Sydney’s inner south and inner west, wetlands were significant places maintained by Aboriginal peoples for millennia (Foster). The violent colonial history that shaped Sydney unfolded along its extensive and dynamic wetlands and connectin…
From photo documentation to photo diagrams
The visualization of nature in cities fundamentally impacts how we imagine the urban environment and our role in caring for it. Across Australia, the project of urban renewal imagines and designs specific typologies of urban nature. These typologies can obscure grass root forms of environmental stewardship and their connection through civic ecologies. Yet, at this time of environmental change, residents’ engagement with urban ecologies is vital. …
Edge
Planty Design Activism
In cities across Australia and elsewhere, individuals and groups are experimenting with initiatives to link urban dwellers to local ecologies and strengthen the relation with and awareness of the environment. Community and street gardens, bush regeneration working bees, botanical and bird-watching expeditions in city parks and green areas are examples of this renewed interest in urban ecologies. What role can we, as design researchers, play in co…
The not-yet-tropical
Mapping and fitness apps, government agencies and departments, and citizen science projects provide a wealth of data on urban green spaces, charting parks, reserves, and green corridors in and around Sydney. These maps represent vegetation as surface and, as Doreen Massey in the 2005 book For Space noted about other types of Western maps, detach the observer from the object of their gaze. The authors argue that, in order to make recombinant ecolo…
Healthcare professionals’ experiences of perinatal loss
Healthcare professionals’ psychological involvement in perinatal loss is a largely overlooked subject by healthcare systems, scientific research and prevention policies. A systematic scientific review has been carried out about emotional experiences, attributed meanings and needs conveyed by healthcare professionals in relation to perinatal loss. We identified 213 studies between 1985 and 2015, 20 of which were included in the present study for q…
Remapping heritage and the garden suburb
Gardens in Australia are considered an important site of heritage maintenance and negotiation for their capacity to materialise transformations in everyday life, design, lifestyles, demographics, environment, as well as social and cultural practices. In the case of conservation areas, gardens tend to be valued in terms of their closeness and potential to preserve specific historical elements. Plants in these gardens are cultivated to evoke period…
The Transcultural Edge
Critical writing about transculturation has a long history in Latin American studies, and more recently the concept has been used to analyse the effects of globalization. This article takes as its point of departure the Latin American genealogy of the idea, and brings it together with the ecological notion of ‘edge’ intended as a transition area between different systems. By bringing transculturation and edge together this paper seeks to understa…
Why Save the World When You can Design It?” Precarity and Fashion in Milan
This paper considers precarity and the fashion industry, focusing on Serpica Naro: a fictitious designer invented by a Milan-based fashion collective involved in social research on intellectual property, subjectivity in the creative industries, and precarious forms of labor in the fashion system
Value the Edge
Permaculture is a creative design process that is based on ethics and design principles. It guides us to mimic the patterns and relationships we can find in nature and can be applied to all aspects of human habitation, from agriculture to ecological building, from appropriate technology to education and even economics. (permacultureprinciples.com)This paper considers permaculture as an example of counterculture in Australia. Permaculture is a neo…
The archive and the contact zones
Indigenous participation in nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century exhibitions and fairs has been often read and represented in terms of captivity narratives. According to this template, Indigenous people were displaced and coerced to perform. While this might have been the case in many instances, this article considers a set of performances that took place as part of the exhibition, Australian Aboriginal Art, at the (then) National Museu…
Second Italy
Reflecting on recent literature on digital literacies, I consider the use of the virtual world Second Life in distance education. To do so, I draw on theories of learning that accommodate elements of instability and uncertainty. Tacit learning is the process of acquiring knowledge from interaction and experience, or mess and play growing out of interactive and networked processes, as opposed to understanding teaching as passing knowledge down. I …
Oggetti Spaesati, Unhomely Belongings
This article analyses first person memories in relation to objects as documented in Belongings, an online exhibition curated through the NSW Migration Heritage Centre. It explores the role of objects in recreating domestic geographies in the process of migration, using the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino's notion of 'crisis of presence' as the moment when familiar objects become unfamiliar or uncanny by losing their relation with the we…
Cannibals and Orchids
This article examines Leona Miller's book Cannibal and Orchids (1941) as an example of how place, in this case Papua New Guinea (PNG), is imagined according to a particular sensorium. It follows the 'sensory turn in anthropology' and the studies developed in the last two decades that take the senses as their object of enquiry. This body of theory is mobilised to analyse Miller's biographical narrative recounting how PNG is imagined, represented a…
Writing Italies, an Introduction
This article outlines the genealogy of 'Italian cultural studies' both as a field of research and as a set of ideas around culture as a way of introducing the journal special issue
Unhomely Europes
This special issue of PORTAL constitutes an indirect, sideways reflection on the EU’s move toward (re-)discovering, establishing, and promoting shared cultural values. It seeks to unveil not the official historical contexts and traditions in which contemporary inventions of cultural identity occur. Rather, its aim is to discover and listen to competing voices and alternative visions—be they cultural, social, political, literary or cinematic—that …
The Transcultural Edge
Critical writing about transculturation has a long history in Latin American studies, and more recently the concept has been used to analyse the effects of globalization. This article takes as its point of departure the Latin American genealogy of the idea, and brings it together with the ecological notion of ‘edge’ intended as a transition area between different systems. By bringing transculturation and edge together this paper seeks to understa…
Value the Edge
Permaculture is a creative design process that is based on ethics and design principles. It guides us to mimic the patterns and relationships we can find in nature and can be applied to all aspects of human habitation, from agriculture to ecological building, from appropriate technology to education and even economics. (permacultureprinciples.com)This paper considers permaculture as an example of counterculture in Australia. Permaculture is a neo…
Oggetti Spaesati, Unhomely Belongings
This article analyses first person memories in relation to objects as documented in Belongings, an online exhibition curated through the NSW Migration Heritage Centre. It explores the role of objects in recreating domestic geographies in the process of migration, using the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino's notion of 'crisis of presence' as the moment when familiar objects become unfamiliar or uncanny by losing their relation with the we…
Why Save the World When You can Design It?” Precarity and Fashion in Milan
This paper considers precarity and the fashion industry, focusing on Serpica Naro: a fictitious designer invented by a Milan-based fashion collective involved in social research on intellectual property, subjectivity in the creative industries, and precarious forms of labor in the fashion system
The not-yet-tropical
Mapping and fitness apps, government agencies and departments, and citizen science projects provide a wealth of data on urban green spaces, charting parks, reserves, and green corridors in and around Sydney. These maps represent vegetation as surface and, as Doreen Massey in the 2005 book For Space noted about other types of Western maps, detach the observer from the object of their gaze. The authors argue that, in order to make recombinant ecolo…
Remapping heritage and the garden suburb
Gardens in Australia are considered an important site of heritage maintenance and negotiation for their capacity to materialise transformations in everyday life, design, lifestyles, demographics, environment, as well as social and cultural practices. In the case of conservation areas, gardens tend to be valued in terms of their closeness and potential to preserve specific historical elements. Plants in these gardens are cultivated to evoke period…
Unhomely Europes
This special issue of PORTAL constitutes an indirect, sideways reflection on the EU’s move toward (re-)discovering, establishing, and promoting shared cultural values. It seeks to unveil not the official historical contexts and traditions in which contemporary inventions of cultural identity occur. Rather, its aim is to discover and listen to competing voices and alternative visions—be they cultural, social, political, literary or cinematic—that …
Writing Italies, an Introduction
This article outlines the genealogy of 'Italian cultural studies' both as a field of research and as a set of ideas around culture as a way of introducing the journal special issue
Cannibals and Orchids
This article examines Leona Miller's book Cannibal and Orchids (1941) as an example of how place, in this case Papua New Guinea (PNG), is imagined according to a particular sensorium. It follows the 'sensory turn in anthropology' and the studies developed in the last two decades that take the senses as their object of enquiry. This body of theory is mobilised to analyse Miller's biographical narrative recounting how PNG is imagined, represented a…
Second Italy
Reflecting on recent literature on digital literacies, I consider the use of the virtual world Second Life in distance education. To do so, I draw on theories of learning that accommodate elements of instability and uncertainty. Tacit learning is the process of acquiring knowledge from interaction and experience, or mess and play growing out of interactive and networked processes, as opposed to understanding teaching as passing knowledge down. I …
Oggetti Spaesati, Unhomely Belongings
This article analyses first person memories in relation to objects as documented in Belongings, an online exhibition curated through the NSW Migration Heritage Centre. It explores the role of objects in recreating domestic geographies in the process of migration, using the Italian anthropologist Ernesto De Martino's notion of 'crisis of presence' as the moment when familiar objects become unfamiliar or uncanny by losing their relation with the we…
Value the Edge
Permaculture is a creative design process that is based on ethics and design principles. It guides us to mimic the patterns and relationships we can find in nature and can be applied to all aspects of human habitation, from agriculture to ecological building, from appropriate technology to education and even economics. (permacultureprinciples.com)This paper considers permaculture as an example of counterculture in Australia. Permaculture is a neo…
The archive and the contact zones
Indigenous participation in nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century exhibitions and fairs has been often read and represented in terms of captivity narratives. According to this template, Indigenous people were displaced and coerced to perform. While this might have been the case in many instances, this article considers a set of performances that took place as part of the exhibition, Australian Aboriginal Art, at the (then) National Museu…
Why Save the World When You can Design It?” Precarity and Fashion in Milan
This paper considers precarity and the fashion industry, focusing on Serpica Naro: a fictitious designer invented by a Milan-based fashion collective involved in social research on intellectual property, subjectivity in the creative industries, and precarious forms of labor in the fashion system
The Transcultural Edge
Critical writing about transculturation has a long history in Latin American studies, and more recently the concept has been used to analyse the effects of globalization. This article takes as its point of departure the Latin American genealogy of the idea, and brings it together with the ecological notion of ‘edge’ intended as a transition area between different systems. By bringing transculturation and edge together this paper seeks to understa…
Healthcare professionals’ experiences of perinatal loss
Healthcare professionals’ psychological involvement in perinatal loss is a largely overlooked subject by healthcare systems, scientific research and prevention policies. A systematic scientific review has been carried out about emotional experiences, attributed meanings and needs conveyed by healthcare professionals in relation to perinatal loss. We identified 213 studies between 1985 and 2015, 20 of which were included in the present study for q…
Remapping heritage and the garden suburb
Gardens in Australia are considered an important site of heritage maintenance and negotiation for their capacity to materialise transformations in everyday life, design, lifestyles, demographics, environment, as well as social and cultural practices. In the case of conservation areas, gardens tend to be valued in terms of their closeness and potential to preserve specific historical elements. Plants in these gardens are cultivated to evoke period…
The not-yet-tropical
Mapping and fitness apps, government agencies and departments, and citizen science projects provide a wealth of data on urban green spaces, charting parks, reserves, and green corridors in and around Sydney. These maps represent vegetation as surface and, as Doreen Massey in the 2005 book For Space noted about other types of Western maps, detach the observer from the object of their gaze. The authors argue that, in order to make recombinant ecolo…
Planty Design Activism
In cities across Australia and elsewhere, individuals and groups are experimenting with initiatives to link urban dwellers to local ecologies and strengthen the relation with and awareness of the environment. Community and street gardens, bush regeneration working bees, botanical and bird-watching expeditions in city parks and green areas are examples of this renewed interest in urban ecologies. What role can we, as design researchers, play in co…
Edge
Visually Communicating Artificial Urban Wetlands
Introduction Urban wetlands in Australia are under threat, yet they provide benefits for climate change mitigation, pollution reduction, habitat provision, and socioecological connection. In what is now known as Sydney’s inner south and inner west, wetlands were significant places maintained by Aboriginal peoples for millennia (Foster). The violent colonial history that shaped Sydney unfolded along its extensive and dynamic wetlands and connectin…
From photo documentation to photo diagrams
The visualization of nature in cities fundamentally impacts how we imagine the urban environment and our role in caring for it. Across Australia, the project of urban renewal imagines and designs specific typologies of urban nature. These typologies can obscure grass root forms of environmental stewardship and their connection through civic ecologies. Yet, at this time of environmental change, residents’ engagement with urban ecologies is vital. …
The Red Frock
In this reflection, I recount my experience supervising a UTS student in Milan during her In-Country Study, where I became a luxury fashion faux buyer as part of her research on luxury shopping. An unexpected encounter in a high-fashion boutique taught me the importance of attentive observation and developing tools to help students make sense of complex global and local interactions. This moment reinforced my appreciation for elevating experience…
Sociology (10 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (7 works) · Political science (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Geography (5 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · History (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Law (4 works)