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.
Giordano 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. This field of inquiries are reflected in her book Migrants in Translation. Caring and the Logics of Difference in Contemporary Italy (University of California Press, 2014), which won 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 was a 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 non-theatrical source material (e.g., interview transcripts, legal and medical reports, news articles, archival documents, visual material, etc.) to devise theater pieces on current events.
This research informs her collaboration 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. Their theatrical projects include Unstories, a 50-minute work on movement, borders, and the current “refugee crisis” in Europe; Unstories II (roaming), a 45-minute piece that furthers the reflection about movement and borders (both co-written with Pierotti); and B-More (written by Pierotti), based around police violence in the U.S.; and
Playing with the relation between truth and representation in the stories they tell as ethnographers in their forthcoming book, Affect Ethnography: Exploring Performance and Narrative in the Creation of Unstories, (Bloomsbury, May 2024), Dr. Giordano and Greg Pierotti contribute to the current debates around experimental research methodologies and ethnographically grounded theatrical forms. Their approach 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 Affect Ethnography 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.
Click here to learn more about Giordano and Pierotti’s collaborative project Affect Theater.