My research focuses on the embodied experience of overlapping planetary crises unfolding across generations and at multiple, often incommensurable scales. Through a reflexive, experimental, and historical engagement with anthropology, I explore ethnography’s distinctive capacity to mediate between the micro-politics of situated bodily experience and the vast political, ecological, and material transformations of our time. I am particularly interested in how global, planetary, and even cosmic processes—climate change, industrial toxicity, geological instability—are endured and contested through the body in everyday life.

My first book, Taken by Poison: Possession and Pollution in Italy’s Postindustrial South (Fordham University Press, forthcoming Spring 2027), is an ethnography of toxicity based on three years of field research in Taranto, southern Italy, one of Europe’s most polluted cities. This work traces poison as both a material and a discursive force—from possession rituals performed by women in the archives of Italian medical anthropology to the region’s polluted landscapes in the present. (see book project section). Building on this work, my current research project, based at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice, Italy, seeks to develop an anthropology of the scales and thresholds inherent in dwelling on a poisoned, unstable earth—thresholds between visible and invisible, life and death, everyday slowness and catastrophic events. How can anthropology mediate between the different temporal and spatial scales of environmental violence—between what lies in and under the earth (from toxicity to seismic volatility and the dead) and what unfolds above it (from human communities to planetary and cosmic processes)? How can we move beyond spatially defined local–global–planetary scales of ecological crisis to attend to the cross-scalar temporalities that shape the forms of disaster we inhabit today? These questions animate my second book project, tentatively entitled While You Were Asleep: Timescales of Disaster and the Everyday near Mount Vesuvius. Referring both to the volcano’s dormant state and to the sleeping dead, the book is an ethnographic meditation on cross-scalar relations between geological rhythms, the everyday temporality of toxicity, and the eruption of social movements.

Current Research Project:
Ecologies of Performance: Multimodal Ethnographies of Environmental Violence and Embodied Resistance in Southern Italy

Principal Investigator: Jasmine Clotilde Pisapia 

Ca’ Foscari University of Venice

Funding: Young Researchers (PNRR)  

Project Duration: 36 months (15/05/2025 – 14/05/2028) 

Keywords: environment, aesthetics, anthropology, performance, theater, images, toxicity

I am currently a Researcher at Ca’ Foscari University in Venice and Principal Investigator of the three-year project Ecologies of Performance: A Multimodal Ethnography of Environmental Violence and Embodied Resistance in the Land of Fires (2025–28). This project examines how communities living in high-risk environments relate to nonhuman forces such as volcanoes, and how these forces entangle with the slow violence of contamination. As part of this project, I have begun developing three main research axes: (1) the relationship between slow, intergenerational toxicity and eruptive events; (2) the nexus of scientific prediction and quotidian divinatory techniques in relation to geological forces; and (3) women’s environmental politics, care practices, and embodied forms of resistance, all of which situate the project within an ecofeminist framework.

The project expands my fieldwork in southern Italy to Terzigno, a town located within the extended archaeological park of Pompeii, where two overlapping disasters unfold on radically different timescales: toxic contamination and volcanic risk. Terzigno bears the traces of multiple histories of fire, from ancient eruptions to mafia-led waste burials that have frequently been set alight. The area became infamous as the “Land of Fires” between 2009 and 2010, when volcanic caves and private lands were used for illegal transnational dumping; this produced long-term health consequences and sparked grassroots resistance, particularly among women. These events have become stratified both in collective memory and in material form, notably in volcanic rock quarries that served as landfills for decades before recent remediation efforts, and that are surrounded by walls of lava strata from eruptions spanning from 79 CE to 1944. Toxicity remains the source of ongoing health anxieties, but the volcano serves as an emblematic figure of the unpredictability of natural forces. Drawing on testimonies from female activists, archaeologists, volcanologists at the Osservatorio Vesuviano, epidemiologists, local officials, and residents, the project approaches the volcano as a cosmological and ecological teacher, a site where deep geo-cosmic time, everyday entanglements, and eruptive events intersect.

Methodologically, my research seeks to rethink how anthropology engages with and across a plurality of scales and media, at a theoretical and a practical level. This orientation grows out of my earlier training in literary and media studies, as well as my work as a curator and dramaturg, where I accompanied artists and performers in the search for forms of expression adequate to site-specific contexts. Thus, while my work resonates with the multimodal turn in anthropology, I approach formats, media, and mediation not as supplemental tools for disseminating research, but as ethnographic materials, dialogic objects, and sites for anthropological theorization. My current research project investigates theater as a space of reflection and resistance, and as a site for rethinking ritual under conditions of environmental violence. In collaboration with local activists, the project will develop performance as both an ethnographic method and a community practice. Since 2023, I have been working with the women’s environmental collective Le Ginestre and NYC-based playwright Richard Maxwell on a theater piece and a mixed-media exhibition to be staged at Terzigno’s Museo Emblema and Museo Archeologico. Supported by the Canada Council for the Arts (Theatre Division), the research phase has included writing workshops and small-scale performances in community centers and at the local archaeological museum.

The project for my second book brings my experience as a dramaturg of collaborative theater-making into dialogue with ethnography to ask, in a more speculative register: What rituals might be imagined in worlds built on ash, waste, and contamination? The conceptual framework for this book emerged in connection with the research theme “Scale” during my 2024–25 fellowship at the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, in conversation with philosophers, art historians, film theorists, physicians, and digital scholars. I presented early findings at the workshop Scale: A Fragmentary Atlas for the Humanities, and I am co-authoring, with philosopher Kirill Chepurin, an piece entitled “Remediating the Volcano: Cross-Scalar Techniques of Living with Fire.” Methodologically, I am developing ethnographic parameters for the emerging field of “geoanthropology,” which is currently shaped by STS, history of science, and philosophy. This is the focus of my invited article, “The Open Underworld,” in the edited volume Geoanthropology: Metabolism, Legal Imagination, and Geopraxis edited by Justas Patkauskas, Pietro Omodeo, Xenia Chiaramonte, and Giovanni Fava. Springer, “Political Epistemology” series.

Preliminary References

Pisapia, Jasmine. “Vessel and Voice: Collaborative Theater-Making and In-Situ Creations in New York and Naples,” International workshop Images, Sound, and Performance as Ways of Knowing co-organized by Valentina Bonifacio and Lisa Stevenson, Ca’ Foscari University, Venice, 4-8 March 2024. 

Pisapia, Jasmine and Valentina Bonifacio. “Of Fireworks and Fireflies: Apotropaic Performances in Anthropology,” introduction to the Italian translation of Michael Taussig, Mastery of Non Mastery in the Age of Meltdown: Michael Taussig, L’arte del non-dominio nell’era dello sfaldamento globale, trans. Michele Bandiera and Enrico Milazzo for the colletivo epidemia (Milano: Meltemi, 2023). 

Pisapia, Jasmine, and Isabella Mongelli. “Per un’antropologia estetica della crisi ecologica: Teatro, arti visive, e ‘crisi della presenza’ nella città di Taranto.” Antropologia 9, no. 3 (2022), 111-132.