Cristiana Giordano

Education

• Ph.D., Anthropology, UC Berkeley, 2006
• M.A., Anthropology, UC Berkeley, 2001
• B.A., Philosophy, Universitá di Pavia (Italy), 1996

About

Cristiana Giordano is an associate professor of anthropology at UC Davis. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley, and her M.A. in philosophy from the University of Pavia, Italy. She works on foreign migration, mental health, the body, and cultural translation in contemporary Italy. Her research addresses the politics of migration in Europe through the lens of ethno-psychiatry and its radical critique of psychiatric, legal, and moral categories of inclusion/exclusion of foreign others; and through the lens of research on the human microbiome and migrant health in Europe. Her broader research interests also engage the relation between psychic life, therapy, clinical sites, and images. She is the author of Migrants in Translation. Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy (University of California Press, 2014), Winner of the Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology, Society for Psychological Anthropology, 2017; the Victor Turner Book Prize for ethnographic writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology, 2016 (second prize); and finalist for the 2015 PEN Center USA UC Press First Book Award.

Giordano’s other line of inquiry involves finding new ways of rendering ethnographic material into written texts and/or artistic forms. She explores new ways in which anthropology can contribute to and learn from performative endeavors, such as theater performance and installations. To this end, she has been training in devising theater techniques which draw from nontheatrical source material (interview transcripts, legal and medical reports, news articles, archival documents, visual material, etc.) to devise theater pieces on current events. She has been collaborating with playwright and director Greg Pierotti (one of the founders of Tectonic Theater Project) on new methodologies at the interstice of the social sciences and performance, and on two theatrical projects: one entitled B-More on police violence in the U.S. (by Pierotti), and one entitled Un-stories on movement, borders, and the current “refugee crisis” in Europe (co-written with Pierotti).

Cristiana and Greg's new book, Affect Ethnography: Exploring Narrative and Performance in the Making of Unstories, is forthcoming with Bloomsbury (May 2024).

Back Cover: Playing with the relation between truth and representation in the stories we tell as ethnographers, this book contributes to the current debates around experimental research methodologies and ethnographically grounded theatrical forms. It departs from other studies by proposing a unique and easily followed methodology that brings together theatrical devising practices and anthropology. Through its theoretical exploration and performative script, the book bridges the relation between ethnographic writing and performativity, and simultaneously troubles conventional narrative practices in theater and anthropology. The practice described in the book, Affect Theater, also emphasizes embodied and affective approaches to empirical research and defines a process for rendering this type of material into imaginative academic writing, collaborative performance, and other inventive forms, applicable across a range of academic disciplines.

https://affecttheater.com/index.html

Research Focus

Medical and psychological anthropology; experimental ethnographies; theater and devising; performance; migration; psychoanalysis; ethno-psychiatry; subjectivity; theories of translation; affect theory; human rights; citizenship; anthropology of the state and the law; Italy, Europe, and the Mediterranean.

Publications

Books

- Giordano, C. Migrants in Translation. Caring and the Politics of Difference in Contemporary Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

Winner of the Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology, Society for Psychological Anthropology, 2017; the Victor Turner Book Prize for ethnographic writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology, 2016; and finalist for the 2015 PEN Center USA UC Press First Book Award.
 

- Giordano, C. and Pierotti, G., Affect Ethnography: Exploring Narrative and Performance in the Making of Unstories, London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming May 2024.

Articles

• Alice Sophie Sarcinelli, Monika Weissensteiner, Cristiana Giordano, Roberta Ragona, Greg Pierotti, “Ariadne’s thread. Interweaving Creative Expressions in Ethnographers’ Practices” (Titre en français: Le fil d’Arianne. Entrelacer les formes créatives dans les pratiques des ethnographes), in Revue des Sciences Sociales, 2022, n. 68, Special issue “50 ans d’écriture en sciences sociales.”
• Giordano, Cristiana, and Rhiannon Noel Welch, “’Living and Breathing Reconfigurings of the World’, or Thinking in the time of COVID,” in Epistemes of Contagion: Touch, Contact, Distance. California Italian Studies, Volume 11, Issue 1, June 2022.
• “Exceeding Crisis: The Psychic Life of Drawings,” in Medical Anthropology Quarterly, special issue: “The Global Psyche: Experiments in Ethics, Politics and Technoscience.” Volume 34, Issue 1, pp. 77–98, March 2020.
• Giordano, Cristiana, and Greg Pierotti, “Getting Caught: A Collaboration On- and Off Stage Between Theater and Anthropology,” in The Drama Review, Volume 64, Number 1, Spring 2020 (T245), pp. 88-106.
• Giordano, Cristiana, and Greg Pierotti. 2020. "The Legal Doctor." In Cultural Anthropology, Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsights, March 12.
• “The Funnel Effect. On Traces and Minor Details,” In Antropologia, Vol. 6, Numero 1, pp. 117-137, April 2019.
• “The Funnel Effect,” LIMN, special issue on “Chokepoints,” March 2018.
• Giordano, Cristiana, and Greg Pierotti, “Dramaturgy,” in Cultural Anthropology, Theorizing the Contemporary web platform, special issue on “Ethnography and Design,” March 2018.
• Giordano, C. (2017) Political Therapeutics: Dialogues and Frictions around Care and Cure, In Medical Anthropology, special issue on “Global Side Effects.
• Giordano, C. (2016) "Catastrophes." In Refugees and the Crisis of Europe, Hot Spots series, Cultural Anthropology website, June 28, 2016.
• Fernando, Mayanthi and Giordano, Cristiana (eds.). "Refugees and the Crisis of Europe." Hot Spots, Cultural Anthropology website, June 28, 2016.
• Giordano, C. (2015) Lying the truth: Practices of confession and recognition, In Current Anthropology, Vol. 56(12): 211-221.
• Giordano, C. (2011) Translating Fanon in the Italian context: Rethinking the ethics of treatment in psychiatry. In Transcultural Psychiatry, Vol.48, No.3, pp. 228-256.
• Giordano, C. (2008) Practices of translation and the making of migrant subjectivities in contemporary Italy. In American Ethnologist, Vol.35, No. 4, pp. 588-606.
• Giordano, C. (2006) Reflections on translation in between the clinic and anthropology. In Taliani, S. and Vacchiano, F. (Eds.), Altri corpi. Antropologia ed etnopsicologia della migrazione, Edizioni Unicopoli, Milano.
• Giordano, C. (2002) Perdersi e ritrovarsi: qualche riflessione sui percorsi della soggettività. In Oltrecorrente. Rivista di filosofia, No. 6.

Performances:

• Unstories
• Unstories II
• Unstories: Disrupting the Narrative Urge (video)
• Affect Theater: A Performative Talk (video) https://www.centerforexperimentalethnography.org/affecttheatre.html

Teaching

• Anthropology and Theater in Conversation: Anthropology 210
• Davis Humanities Cluster on Research, Narrative, and Performance: Explorations in between the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities
• Cluster Description.pdf

Workshop:

• Affect Theater

Awards

2017 Boyer Prize for Contributions to Psychoanalytic Anthropology, Society for Psychological Anthropology

2016 Victor Turner Book Prize, Society for Humanistic Anthropology (second prize)

2015 Finalist for the 2015 PEN Center USA UC Press First Book Award