Roberta Raffaetà
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 77411 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Roberta Raffaetà |
| PRENOMES | Roberta |
| SOBRENOME | Raffaetà |
| ASSINATURA | RAFFAETÀ R |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Ca' Foscari University of Venice |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0680-1613 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 33 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 72 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2007 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Genomic Screening from Healthfare to Warfare
Precision medicine refers to the individualization of medical treatment through the large-scale collection, integration, and interpretation of individual-level data. Although its institutional trajectories and applications vary across national contexts, precision medicine has occupied a central position in U.S. health policy since 2015, generating unprecedented investments in data extraction, integration and analysis. This article critically exam…
From gut feelings to data assets
The paper contributes to ongoing discussions about the sociopolitical implications of microbiome research reflecting on the “metabolic political economy” of the gut and cautioning against overlooking the complex tensions and ambiguities inherent in the commercialization of microbial science. It investigates the multiple processes underlying the gut’s valuation practices in the context of interactions between academic research and a startup active…
Capitalization and the production of value at the nexus of academia and industry
This article analyses valuation practices, focusing on the way health data constitute different kinds of assets for different actors within an industry-academia partnership in the field of microbiome research. It examines emerging bioeconomic dynamics within data-driven computational biology, contributing to debates about the sociopolitical implications of multiple and synergic valuation practices in personalized medicine for future public health…
Data as environment, environment as data
This article analyses the operationalization of One Health in the context of data-intensive science in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Building on ethnographic field research and revisiting the lives of a knowledge infrastructure of interdisciplinary collaboration set up online in the early phase of the COVID-19 health emergency, the article develops the notion of "data as environment." This environment is a contact structure that entangles kn…
Afterword - Crafting Data, Crafting Worlds Across Disciplines
This special issue draws from the AAA panel 'Entangling data while entangling disciplines: discussing the future of anthropological collaborations with data scientists'. It deals with experiences of anthropologists who have collaborated with data scientists. To render the panel truly interdisciplinary, the organizers of the AAA panel invited a data scientist as discussant, Katie Amato. Below her comments have been elaborated in the form of a dial…
Special Issue Editorial Introduction
This special issue discusses forms of possible collaboration and mutual intermixing between anthropology and data science, by presenting projects and creative experiments that have been conducted astray the two fields. While we may say that all scientists work with data, this special issue focuses on data that are collected and/or processed by digital means. In addition, attention will be paid to computation as anthropologists have recently turne…
Microbes and Health
This chapter looks at the convergence between microbiome research and recent developments in genetics that have caused a revolution and how this has brought an ecosystemic view of health into play. From an anthropological perspective, I shall discuss the intersections between this new way of studying health and technoscientific classification and racialisation practices.
The Ethics and Politics of the Pragmatic Approach
In this chapter is described what it means, in metagenomics, to be pragmatic, how it is learnt and how it determines specific ethical and political attitudes. Then, it is illustrated how the pragmatic approach manifests itself in the lived experience and sensibilities of researchers and how this stands in tension with the logic by which they create categorisations from their data. The objective is to get the unspoken politics in the lab’s epistem…
What Are Microbes?
This chapter reconstructs the social history of microbes and illustrates its partial synthesis thanks to the latest technologies. At first glance, defining microbes (tiny organisms invisible to the naked eye) might seem trivial, but the chapter shows how definitions and ways of understanding and ‘seeing’ microbes have varied in different places and historical periods, as a result of the interaction between ways of doing science and different soci…
“Overselling the Microbiome”
In this chapter some case studies are discussed. In these case studies, the pragmatic approach, combined with the computational power of metagenomics, presents some shortcomings. Their illustration allows the analysis of the lights and shadows cast by the development of a number of microbiome and ‘personalised medicine’ startups – a field promoted by major economic interests but which also opens up new socio-political and health horizons. The cha…
Conclusion
This concluding chapter reflects on the contributions of the book: (1) laying the foundations for an anthropology that approaches microbes not only in terms of the relationship between nature and culture but also through a comparison and integration of anthropological and biotechnological scientific knowledge; (2) a reflection of the reconfiguration of both health and politics in an interdependent planet; (3) the role of humans in it.
The Microbial Ecosystem at the Crossroads Between Disciplines
In this chapter, it is analysed how the concept of ‘microbial ecosystem’ functions as relational technology, or rather as a specific way of relating certain elements of a system. It is illustrated how, in this process, the microbial ecosystem also becomes an aspirational technology, or rather, a means of expressing researchers’ aspiration to make different scales interact. The chapter shows how the social sciences and metagenomics can collaborate…
“Just Think Computationally!”
This chapter analyses how researchers and technology work together. In so doing the chapter interrogates how – and if – the experimental process changes when the management of trial and error is shared between humans and computers and thus partially automated. The reply to this question is given by equating the ethnographic observations to classical themes from the philosophy and social anthropology of science, such as the reality of science and …
The Microbiome, Genetics and Postgenomics
In this chapter, an analysis of the historical and theoretical foundations of metagenomics will serve as the basis for demonstrating how metagenomics acts as a bridge between the traditional genetic paradigm and a new one, still under construction. The chapter contextualises the reflections of researchers on the inside of the historical progression from the ‘century of the gene’ to the birth and development of postgenomics, illustrating how these…
Studying Microbes
This chapter illustrates how researchers in a metagenomics lab see microbes, or, as they say, “see who’s there”. The chapter is all about the divide – and the relationships – between traditional and computational biology and what this means in terms of knowledge and the politics of science.
Metagenomic Futures
Metagenomic Futures
This book is an ethnographic exploration of what it means to be human from a more-than-human perspective, the microbial perspective. It engages with the scientific study of the microbiome and the vast microbial biodiversity that surrounds and constitutes us. Microbes connect human bodies with the environment in which they live and have important implications for both human and environmental health. Scientists studying the microbiome are explorers…
Covid-19
Etica e progettazione europea. Uno studio di caso
In questo articolo vengono discussi gli aspetti etici, con particolare riferimento al GDPR, di un studio di caso (finanziamento ERC) di progettazione europea. Attraverso una ricostruzione etnografica del processo, delle negoziazioni, dei dubbi e delle frustrazioni, il tentativo è quello di decostruire l’etica come un campo che pertiene strettamente alla dimensione legale o amministrativa, ma mostrare come tali dimensioni dipendano da elementi soc…
Migrant youth 'between mobilities
Conventionally, young people today are seen to be benefited by opportunities for mobility and disadvantaged by staying in place. We seek to advance critiques of this binarism by exploring the mobility and attachment aspirations and experiences of the 1.5 generation: those who migrate as children accompanying their parents. Building on calls to better understand the complexity of both mobility and staying in place for migrant youth, we analyse the…
Microbial Antagonism in the Trentino Alps
In this paper I analyze fermentation practices in the production of cheese in Alpine high mountain summer pastures and their connection to politics of space, heritage, and ownership in times of ecological, social, scientific, and economic transition. In the Trentino Alps, fermentation is a technology for enacting different spacetimes in that it is not only a technical act but is also connected to how people practice and give meaning to places. I …
Another Day in Dystopia. Italy in the Time of Covid-19
Another Day in Dystopia
Tutti i colori del verde. Il ruolo del verde urbano nei processi di cittadinanza nella città di Bolzano
L’articolo analizza come la percezione e le pratiche relative al verde urbano nella città di Bolzano siano implicate in progetti di cittadinanza ed etnicizzazione, con particolare riferimento all’italianizzazione della zona a partire dal primo dopoguerra. Attraverso una metodologia etnografica (parte di un progetto interdisciplinare), l’articolo mostra come la percezione e fruizione del verde urbano di Bolzano sia il risultato di tracce storiche …
Caring across borders
Health care supply, demand and responsibility are increasingly becoming transnational. More people seek care beyond state borders, while, at the same time, most health systems are still nationally organized. Though most of socio-anthropological literature focuses on 'health tourism', this article considers migrants' health travels at the junction between the neoliberal framework of global health and politics of belonging. It explores the transnat…
It's complicated, isn't it
This article explores the experiences of second-generation migrants with a focus on Chinese in Prato (Italy), for whom the relationship between citizenship and identity is tightly linked. Most studies maintain that the link between citizenship and identity is instrumentalist or ambiguous. In contrast, we focus on the affective dimension of citizenship and identity. We argue that citizenship status functions as a key defining concept of identity i…
Putting Belonging into Place
This paper explores the meaning and mechanics of belonging with a particular focus on the role of place and place-making. It explores the ways people come to achieve a sense of belonging with reference to recent theoretical treatments of place, territory, and mobility. We ground our discussion in analysis of an ethnographic case ofEcuadorian families who have migrated toTrentino in northernItaly. Most families miss the social relationships and pl…
Metagenomic Futures
This book is an ethnographic exploration of what it means to be human from a more-than-human perspective, the microbial perspective. It engages with the scientific study of the microbiome and the vast microbial biodiversity that surrounds and constitutes us. Microbes connect human bodies with the environment in which they live and have important implications for both human and environmental health. Scientists studying the microbiome are explorers…
It's complicated, isn't it
This article explores the experiences of second-generation migrants with a focus on Chinese in Prato (Italy), for whom the relationship between citizenship and identity is tightly linked. Most studies maintain that the link between citizenship and identity is instrumentalist or ambiguous. In contrast, we focus on the affective dimension of citizenship and identity. We argue that citizenship status functions as a key defining concept of identity i…
Microbial Antagonism in the Trentino Alps
In this paper I analyze fermentation practices in the production of cheese in Alpine high mountain summer pastures and their connection to politics of space, heritage, and ownership in times of ecological, social, scientific, and economic transition. In the Trentino Alps, fermentation is a technology for enacting different spacetimes in that it is not only a technical act but is also connected to how people practice and give meaning to places. I …
Migrant youth 'between mobilities
Conventionally, young people today are seen to be benefited by opportunities for mobility and disadvantaged by staying in place. We seek to advance critiques of this binarism by exploring the mobility and attachment aspirations and experiences of the 1.5 generation: those who migrate as children accompanying their parents. Building on calls to better understand the complexity of both mobility and staying in place for migrant youth, we analyse the…
Allergy Narratives in Italy
Based on an ethnographic study conducted in both biomedical and complementary and alternative medicine settings in north Italy, I explore how people and practitioners make sense of allergy and how patients utilize plural healing options. Despite a wide range of medical modalities, people categorize and use medicine according to whether they are 'natural' or 'not-natural,' thus dissolving any potential confusion between diverse therapies. I analyz…
Special Issue Editorial Introduction
This special issue discusses forms of possible collaboration and mutual intermixing between anthropology and data science, by presenting projects and creative experiments that have been conducted astray the two fields. While we may say that all scientists work with data, this special issue focuses on data that are collected and/or processed by digital means. In addition, attention will be paid to computation as anthropologists have recently turne…
Tutti i colori del verde. Il ruolo del verde urbano nei processi di cittadinanza nella città di Bolzano
L’articolo analizza come la percezione e le pratiche relative al verde urbano nella città di Bolzano siano implicate in progetti di cittadinanza ed etnicizzazione, con particolare riferimento all’italianizzazione della zona a partire dal primo dopoguerra. Attraverso una metodologia etnografica (parte di un progetto interdisciplinare), l’articolo mostra come la percezione e fruizione del verde urbano di Bolzano sia il risultato di tracce storiche …
The politics of publishing
In times of increased competition for job positions, the pressure to publish or perish is building up. As is well known, every aspect of human life is imbued with politics, and publishing is not an
Data as environment, environment as data
This article analyses the operationalization of One Health in the context of data-intensive science in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Building on ethnographic field research and revisiting the lives of a knowledge infrastructure of interdisciplinary collaboration set up online in the early phase of the COVID-19 health emergency, the article develops the notion of "data as environment." This environment is a contact structure that entangles kn…
Covid-19
Etica e progettazione europea. Uno studio di caso
In questo articolo vengono discussi gli aspetti etici, con particolare riferimento al GDPR, di un studio di caso (finanziamento ERC) di progettazione europea. Attraverso una ricostruzione etnografica del processo, delle negoziazioni, dei dubbi e delle frustrazioni, il tentativo è quello di decostruire l’etica come un campo che pertiene strettamente alla dimensione legale o amministrativa, ma mostrare come tali dimensioni dipendano da elementi soc…
My Parents Never Spent Time With Me! Migrants' Parents in Italy and Hegemonic Ideals of Competent Parenting
Mothers who migrated from Morocco and Ecuador to northeast Italy are the subject for this article, which explores the way in which they observe Italian parenting and tend to negatively evaluate the care they received at home. They consider their settlement in Italy as an opportunity to acquire a 'modern' style of parenting. They also access websites and books to seek advice on how to parent, mixing home-country and settlement-country sources of i…
Health and Social Research in Multiethnic Societies
Conflicting sensory relationships. Encounters with allergic people
Increasingly, people employ the term 'allergy' to define various pathological conditions, although the biomedical community lacks a consensus on a definition of the term. It has become a widespread and convenient label for diverse conditions, often going beyond biomedical diagnosis. The aim of this paper is to explore how allergic people narrate their illness experiences, focusing specifically on the relationship between words, senses and bodies.…
Putting Belonging into Place
This paper explores the meaning and mechanics of belonging with a particular focus on the role of place and place-making. It explores the ways people come to achieve a sense of belonging with reference to recent theoretical treatments of place, territory, and mobility. We ground our discussion in analysis of an ethnographic case ofEcuadorian families who have migrated toTrentino in northernItaly. Most families miss the social relationships and pl…
Allergy Narratives in Italy
Based on an ethnographic study conducted in both biomedical and complementary and alternative medicine settings in north Italy, I explore how people and practitioners make sense of allergy and how patients utilize plural healing options. Despite a wide range of medical modalities, people categorize and use medicine according to whether they are 'natural' or 'not-natural,' thus dissolving any potential confusion between diverse therapies. I analyz…
Negotiating Care in Uncertain Settings and Looking Beneath the Surface of Health Governance Projects
On 18 December 2014, the results of the U.K.’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) evaluation exercise were released. This extensive and very costly exercise is intended to take the pulse of U.K. university-based research and now happens once every six years or so. It is also the principal tool used to determine the allocation of approximately £1.6 billion of quality-related (QR) research funding which maintains the fabric of research activity in…
My Parents Never Spent Time With Me! Migrants' Parents in Italy and Hegemonic Ideals of Competent Parenting
Mothers who migrated from Morocco and Ecuador to northeast Italy are the subject for this article, which explores the way in which they observe Italian parenting and tend to negatively evaluate the care they received at home. They consider their settlement in Italy as an opportunity to acquire a 'modern' style of parenting. They also access websites and books to seek advice on how to parent, mixing home-country and settlement-country sources of i…
The politics of publishing
In times of increased competition for job positions, the pressure to publish or perish is building up. As is well known, every aspect of human life is imbued with politics, and publishing is not an
Chinese immigrant youth identities and belonging in Prato, Italy
This article explores the experiences of young people of Chinese background in Prato (Italy). Despite significant social exclusion, young Chinese develop a sense of belonging to Prato by creating local, translocal and transnational affiliations and interconnections. These relationships contribute to making an often overtly hostile local reality, liveable and meaningful. A central aim of this article is to examine the intersection between migratio…
It's complicated, isn't it
This article explores the experiences of second-generation migrants with a focus on Chinese in Prato (Italy), for whom the relationship between citizenship and identity is tightly linked. Most studies maintain that the link between citizenship and identity is instrumentalist or ambiguous. In contrast, we focus on the affective dimension of citizenship and identity. We argue that citizenship status functions as a key defining concept of identity i…
Tutti i colori del verde. Il ruolo del verde urbano nei processi di cittadinanza nella città di Bolzano
L’articolo analizza come la percezione e le pratiche relative al verde urbano nella città di Bolzano siano implicate in progetti di cittadinanza ed etnicizzazione, con particolare riferimento all’italianizzazione della zona a partire dal primo dopoguerra. Attraverso una metodologia etnografica (parte di un progetto interdisciplinare), l’articolo mostra come la percezione e fruizione del verde urbano di Bolzano sia il risultato di tracce storiche …
Caring across borders
Health care supply, demand and responsibility are increasingly becoming transnational. More people seek care beyond state borders, while, at the same time, most health systems are still nationally organized. Though most of socio-anthropological literature focuses on 'health tourism', this article considers migrants' health travels at the junction between the neoliberal framework of global health and politics of belonging. It explores the transnat…
Another Day in Dystopia. Italy in the Time of Covid-19
Another Day in Dystopia
Covid-19
Etica e progettazione europea. Uno studio di caso
In questo articolo vengono discussi gli aspetti etici, con particolare riferimento al GDPR, di un studio di caso (finanziamento ERC) di progettazione europea. Attraverso una ricostruzione etnografica del processo, delle negoziazioni, dei dubbi e delle frustrazioni, il tentativo è quello di decostruire l’etica come un campo che pertiene strettamente alla dimensione legale o amministrativa, ma mostrare come tali dimensioni dipendano da elementi soc…
Migrant youth 'between mobilities
Conventionally, young people today are seen to be benefited by opportunities for mobility and disadvantaged by staying in place. We seek to advance critiques of this binarism by exploring the mobility and attachment aspirations and experiences of the 1.5 generation: those who migrate as children accompanying their parents. Building on calls to better understand the complexity of both mobility and staying in place for migrant youth, we analyse the…
Microbial Antagonism in the Trentino Alps
In this paper I analyze fermentation practices in the production of cheese in Alpine high mountain summer pastures and their connection to politics of space, heritage, and ownership in times of ecological, social, scientific, and economic transition. In the Trentino Alps, fermentation is a technology for enacting different spacetimes in that it is not only a technical act but is also connected to how people practice and give meaning to places. I …
Microbes and Health
This chapter looks at the convergence between microbiome research and recent developments in genetics that have caused a revolution and how this has brought an ecosystemic view of health into play. From an anthropological perspective, I shall discuss the intersections between this new way of studying health and technoscientific classification and racialisation practices.
The Ethics and Politics of the Pragmatic Approach
In this chapter is described what it means, in metagenomics, to be pragmatic, how it is learnt and how it determines specific ethical and political attitudes. Then, it is illustrated how the pragmatic approach manifests itself in the lived experience and sensibilities of researchers and how this stands in tension with the logic by which they create categorisations from their data. The objective is to get the unspoken politics in the lab’s epistem…
What Are Microbes?
This chapter reconstructs the social history of microbes and illustrates its partial synthesis thanks to the latest technologies. At first glance, defining microbes (tiny organisms invisible to the naked eye) might seem trivial, but the chapter shows how definitions and ways of understanding and ‘seeing’ microbes have varied in different places and historical periods, as a result of the interaction between ways of doing science and different soci…
“Overselling the Microbiome”
In this chapter some case studies are discussed. In these case studies, the pragmatic approach, combined with the computational power of metagenomics, presents some shortcomings. Their illustration allows the analysis of the lights and shadows cast by the development of a number of microbiome and ‘personalised medicine’ startups – a field promoted by major economic interests but which also opens up new socio-political and health horizons. The cha…
Conclusion
This concluding chapter reflects on the contributions of the book: (1) laying the foundations for an anthropology that approaches microbes not only in terms of the relationship between nature and culture but also through a comparison and integration of anthropological and biotechnological scientific knowledge; (2) a reflection of the reconfiguration of both health and politics in an interdependent planet; (3) the role of humans in it.
The Microbial Ecosystem at the Crossroads Between Disciplines
In this chapter, it is analysed how the concept of ‘microbial ecosystem’ functions as relational technology, or rather as a specific way of relating certain elements of a system. It is illustrated how, in this process, the microbial ecosystem also becomes an aspirational technology, or rather, a means of expressing researchers’ aspiration to make different scales interact. The chapter shows how the social sciences and metagenomics can collaborate…
“Just Think Computationally!”
This chapter analyses how researchers and technology work together. In so doing the chapter interrogates how – and if – the experimental process changes when the management of trial and error is shared between humans and computers and thus partially automated. The reply to this question is given by equating the ethnographic observations to classical themes from the philosophy and social anthropology of science, such as the reality of science and …
The Microbiome, Genetics and Postgenomics
In this chapter, an analysis of the historical and theoretical foundations of metagenomics will serve as the basis for demonstrating how metagenomics acts as a bridge between the traditional genetic paradigm and a new one, still under construction. The chapter contextualises the reflections of researchers on the inside of the historical progression from the ‘century of the gene’ to the birth and development of postgenomics, illustrating how these…
Studying Microbes
This chapter illustrates how researchers in a metagenomics lab see microbes, or, as they say, “see who’s there”. The chapter is all about the divide – and the relationships – between traditional and computational biology and what this means in terms of knowledge and the politics of science.
Sociology (17 obras) · Political science (12 obras) · Biology (8 obras) · Computer Science (8 obras) · Law (8 obras) · Politics (8 obras) · Philosophy (7 obras) · Geographies of human-animal interactions (6 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (5 obras) · Anthropology (5 obras)