Chiara Collamati is an Italian political philosophy researcher holding a double PhD from the University of Padova (Italy) and University of Toulouse II Jean Jaurès (France).
Collamati comes to UC Santa Cruz with three-year funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme, under the highly prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship.
UC Santa Cruz is an ideal institution for Collamati due to its reputation for innovation and political engagement, and through the legacy of professors Angela Davis, Donna Haraway, and Hayden White. In addition, she finds inspiration through the work of Professors Massimiliano Tomba and Banu Bargu in the History of Consciousness Department.
Work for her current research project: “New Times at Work: Rethinking History and Politics through Delay and Anticipation” is being developed in collaboration with the Department of History of Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz and the Research Center on “Matérialités de la Politique” at the University of Liège, Belgium.
The project aims to produce concepts to understand the temporal structures of late capitalism in relation to current labor and social movements. Can the condition of delay experienced by many subjects be transformed into a condition for anticipating forms of non-capitalistic sociality?
The main output of the research will be to transform the instruments for the analysis of social times in operators for a political historiography connected to effective emancipatory practices.
“Looking at revolutions that reorganized social life, whether from France, Russia, Cuba, or Chiapas, can we take these experiences and explain or influence change now? Can traditions reactivate movements? I also look to understand ways that people live together while developing new relationships with the past,” Collamati said.
While at UC Santa Cruz, her research has benefited from interdivisional collaboration with anthropology and sociology researchers, allowing her to better understand how research might entangle with social and political transformations.
“When collaborating internationally, I realized that the dialogue with different perspectives and experiences not only improves but also reshapes my research,” Collamati said. “In Europe, philosophy is often a work of conceptual abstraction, based on adherence to the works of ‘canonical thinkers’. Instead, here at UC Santa Cruz, I am learning to practice political theory through a concrete cases studies approach.” Visit ORBI (Academic Publications Portal) or https://ulg.academia.edu/ChiaraCollamati to learn more about Chiara Collamati’s research and published work.