Dr. Elisa Lanari

Elisa Lanari is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Socio-Cultural Diversity, where she is carrying out the project, “A precarious mountain cosmopolitanism: Diversity and the afterlives of welcome in Italian mountain towns.”

Trained as a socio-cultural anthropologist, Elisa employs ethnographic and participatory research methods to study how people and communities mobilize around issues of diversity, racialized and gendered inequalities. She has developed this focus through research in so-called "new" immigrant destinations, including both small-town Italy and the suburban US South.

Supported by the Wenner-Gren and US National Science Foundation, Elisa’s PhD research explored how Latinx and other BIPOC residents reshaped the social life, spaces, and politics of Atlanta’s white suburbs. Her book manuscript, Re(In)surgent Suburbia, traces how resurgent white supremacy and insurgent city-making intersect in the history and transformations one Atlanta community from the post-Civil Rights to the post-Trump era.

Prior to joining the MPI, Elisa was a Visiting Researcher at the SSIIM UNESCO Chair of the IUAV University of Venice, Italy, where she collaborated in two AMIF-funded projects engaging local organizations focusing on migrants’ social and spatial inclusion. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Northwestern University (2019), an MA in Cultural Anthropology, Ethnology, and Ethno-Linguistics (2010) and a BA in Philosophy (2007) from Ca' Foscari University of Venice, Italy.

Research projects

• Diversity and the afterlives of welcome in Italian mountain towns

Publications

Journal Articles

Lanari, E. (2024). Makeshift activism and the afterlives of refugee welcome in Covid-19 Italy. Critique of Anthropology, online first, 1-20. https://doi:10.1177/0308275X241249646

Lanari, E. (2023). Latina M(other)work against racism: Living with legal precarity in suburban Atlanta. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 46(2), 316–337. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2022.2110382

Lanari, E. (2022). Speaking up, rising above: Latina lived citizenship in the metropolitan US South. Citizenship Studies, 26(1), 38–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/13621025.2021.2011143

Lanari, E. (2019). Envisioning a New City Center: Time, Displacement, and Atlanta’s Suburban Futures. City & Society, 31(3), 365–391. https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12224

Lanari, E. (2017). Excluded from ‘Everybody’s Neighborhood’? Constructing Sandy Springs’ New City Center. Atlanta Studies. https://doi.org/10.18737/atls20170209

Contributions to a Collected Edition

Lanari, E. (2022). ‘Here, Morality Is a Sense of Entitlement’: Citizenship, Deservingness and Inequality in Suburban America. In J. Tošić & A. Streinzer (Eds.), Ethnographies of Deservingness: Unpacking Ideologies of Distribution and Inequality (pp. 222–250). New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Lanari, E., & Mafizzoli, L. (2021). Pensare la contemporaneità [thinking about the contemporary]. In G. Ligi (Ed.), I colori dell’Antropologia (pp. 392–432). Giunti TVP Editori.

Other Publications

Garofalo, L., Lanari, E., & Cavicchioli, M. (2020, September 10). Sounds Fishy? The Sardines movement in Italy. Retrieved from Anthropology News website: https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/sounds-fishy/

Lanari, E. (2020). What Happened in Georgia? On Suburbs and Other Anthropological Blind Spots – Home Field. Retrieved from HOME/FIELD website: https://www.homefieldanthro.org/2022/01/26/what-happened-in-georgia/