Research Team
Meet the researchers and collaborators contributing to LUMINE’s comparative study of labour unions, migrant workers and ethnic inequalities in Europe.
Katia Pilati
Full Professor & PI
Lucia Amorosi
Postdoctoral Researcher
Norma Baldino
Postdoctoral Researcher
Elif Cemre Besgur
Research Fellow
Paola Imperatore
Postdoctoral Researcher
Lorenzo Lodi
Postdoctoral Researcher
Matteo Lupoli
Postdoctoral Researcher
Camilla Macciani
Postdoctoral Researcher
Maria Antonietta Maneschi
PhD Candidate
Silvia Mazzzaglia
Postdoctoral Researcher
Margherita Sabrina Perra
Assoc. Professor & Project Collaborator
Nicola Quondamatteo
Postdoctoral Researcher
Erasmo Sossich
Postdoctoral Researcher
Jacopo Staiano
Assoc. Professor & Project Collaborator
Former Researchers
Francesco Bagnardi
Postdoctoral Researcher
Katia Pilati
I am Full Professor at the Department of Sociology and Social Research (DSRS) of the University of Trento. Before joining DSRS, I was a Marie Curie fellow at the Department of Political Science at the University of Geneva (Switzerland), and a FRS-FNRS research fellow at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (Belgium). My main research interests are social movements, labor movements, civil society, civic and political participation, social networks, migration and political integration. Currently, I am Principal Investigator of the project “Labor Unions, Migrant Workers, and Ethnic Inequalities” (FIS-2023-03030 Advanced Grant, MUR- CUP E53C24003840001) and “Labor Actions, Italy 2008-2023” exploring workers’ collective actions in Italy since 2008.
Lucia Amorosi
Lucia Amorosi is a researcher at the University of Trento. After studying in different universities in Italy, as well as in Portugal and Brasil, she earned a PhD in Economic Sociology and Labor Studies at the University of Milan and conducted research at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the University of Manchester. Her work addresses domestic labor, trade unions, migrant labor, and labor exploitation from an intersectional and interdisciplinary perspective. She has taken part in national and international conferences and authored several scientific publications in leading Italian and international journals.
Norma Baldino
Norma Baldino is a postdoctoral researcher in the FIS LUMINE project at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento. Her research interests focus on ethnic inequalities and the construction of alterity, drawing on perspectives from general sociology and migration studies, with particular attention to socially marginalised groups and subcultural contexts. Within the LUMINE project, she works on labour, collective action, and the representation of migrant workers, with particular attention to the role of trade unions. Her empirical research focuses on the agricultural sector in the province of Lleida (Spain), analysing working conditions and forms of organisation and mobilisation among migrant workers. She obtained her PhD in Sociology from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, with a comparative ethnographic study between Cagliari and Granada on identity construction processes within Romani/Gitano communities, understood as dynamics of self- and hetero-recognition in marginal urban contexts. Before her current position, she collaborated with the University of Cagliari, where she was a contract lecturer in General Sociology and contributed to several national and international research projects, also focusing on local development, agriculture, and migrant labour exploitation in Sardinia.
Elif Cemre Besgur
Elif Cemre Besgür is a Research Fellow for the LUMINE project at the Department of Sociology and Social Research, University of Trento. She holds a PhD in International Studies from the University of Trento and an MSc in European Integration from the Vrije Universiteit Brussels. Her research background spans international political economy, with a focus on EU policy, investment screening regulation, and migration. Prior to joining LUMINE, she held different research positions at the University of Trento, and was a Visiting Researcher at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. At LUMINE, she currently combines research responsibilities with project coordination and management.
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Paola Imperatore
Paola Imperatore is a researcher in the Department of Sociology and Social Research at the University of Trento. Her research interests focus on environmental conflicts, social movements, political ecology, climate and labour, with an intersectional perspective. Her recent research has explored industrial relations, worker participation, and ecological transitions, combining qualitative and quantitative methods. She is the author of two books and several scientific articles in leading academic journals and she has been invited to discuss her research on climate governance, ecology and labour at numerous conferences and public events in Italy and internationally.
Lorenzo Lodi
Lorenzo Lodi is a labour sociologist and political economist, with a Ph.D. from Scuola Normale Superiore and currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Trento. His work focuses on global value chains (GVC), labour regimes and labour mobilizations, the main subjects of his published articles and his doctoral research on class relations and uneven development in Morocco and Tunisia through the prism of the automotive GVC. Lorenzo is an empirical scholar with significant fieldwork experience, particularly in North Africa, but is also interested in theoretical discussions and research on Marxist approaches to industrial and class transformations, labour movements and theories of imperialism and core-periphery dynamics in the capitalist world system.
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Matteo Lupoli
Matteo Lupoli obtained a PhD in Sociology and Social Research at the Department of Sociology and Business Law of the University of Bologna in 2024, with a dissertation titled “Ecology and Politics of Seaside Tourism: Cheap Labour and Cheap Nature in Rimini and Durrës.” His work intersects labour sociology, political ecology, and the study of industrial and urban transformation, with a longstanding fieldwork engagement on the Albanian coast and in Emilia – Romagna (Italy). His research interests include working conditions, industrial relations, trade union and non-union organisational forms, and the territorial transformations connected to industrial development. He worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Sociology and Business Law of the University of Bologna within the PRIN2022 project “Just Transition in the Factory: Workers’ Mobilisation and participatory innovation in emergent Italian experiences,” where he focused on the Ravenna case study, examining the role of trade unions and workers in the transition process of the energy industry. He authored a monograph based on his PhD thesis, published by Orthotes (2026)” and, between 2022 and 2026, some articles in national and international scientific journals. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Labor Unions, Migrant Workers and Ethnic Inequalities” – LUMINE, at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento.
Camilla Macciani
Camilla Macciani is a post-doctoral research fellow in sociology at the University of Trento, where she is part of the LUMINE research unit investigating the relationship between labour unions, migrant workers and ethnic inequalities. She obtained her PhD from the University of Calabria in September 2024, with a dissertation exploring the forms of oppression and resistance of racialized migrant farmworkers living in the province of Foggia through the lens of racial capitalism, under the supervision of Prof. Alessandra Corrado. From 2019 to 2024, she has been living in the province of Foggia, where she has conducted her PhD research while actively participating in migrant farmworkers’ forms of self-organization and struggle, and contributing to the creation of a free legal drop-in centre in the informal settlement of Torretta Antonacci. Her research interests include migration and border studies, agriculture, racial capitalism, and labour studies.
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Maria Antonietta Maneschi
Maria Antonietta Maneschi is a PhD Candidate at the University of Trento. She obtained a Master degree in 2022 at Sciences Po Paris in Environmental Policy, with a major in sustainability of the agricultural sector. She then worked at the FAO, and as a researcher at IRAM in Paris, where she conducted several evaluations for the WFP as an external researcher. She joined the University of Trento in July 2024 as a research fellow within the project Making Food Democracy. There, she analysed social movement organisations and local policies for sustainable food systems transition. She engaged in quantitative and qualitative research, conducting field missions in France and Belgium. In November 2025, she started a PhD in Sociology at the University of Trento. Her research focuses on coalitions between labour unions and social movement organisations on the issues related to migrant workers’ exploitation in the agricultural context.
Silvia Mazzaglia
Silvia Mazzaglia is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento, within the FIS project LUMINE – Labour Unions, Migrant workers and Ethnic Inequalities, where she is responsible for the fieldwork in France. In 2026, she obtained a PhD in Analysis of Social and Economic Processes from the University of Milano-Bicocca, where she conducted research, culminating in her dissertation, Behind the Scenes. Unveiling Service Work in the Events Industry: A Qualitative Study in Milan. During her PhD, she spent six months as a Postgraduate Researcher at the Department of People, Work, Employment at Leeds University Business School. Her research interests focus on workers’ experiences, precariousness, migrant labour and trade unions, with particular attention to low-skilled occupations in the service sector. Her research draws on the theoretical perspectives of the sociology of work, labour process theory, industrial relations, and social movement studies.
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Nicola Quondamatteo
Nicola Quondamatteo is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Trento. He held a PhD in Political Science and Sociology from the Scuola Normale Superiore, with a dissertation on subcontracting, migrant labour, and union strategies in the Italian shipbuilding industry. During his PhD, he took part – as a member of the Italian research unit – in a comparative project funded by the Research Council of Norway, which focused on the transformation of recruitment practices in the shipbuilding sector across five European countries. He was a research fellow for two years at the University of Padua, where he worked on severe forms of labour exploitation in shipbuilding and tourism. His research interests also include industrial relations, labour market segmentation, labour regulation processes at the national and EU levels, and the platform economy. He was a visiting scholar at the European Trade Union Institute and Aalborg University.
Jacopo Staiano
Jacopo Staiano is Associate Professor at the Department of Economics & Management, University of Trento. He has worked on modelling human behaviour around technology – affective computing, personality from mobile data, the economics of personal data, virality – and on natural language generation and its evaluation, from referenceless metrics to countering misinformation and supporting professional fact-checking. His current research focuses on how language models behave when they act on behalf of people: planning, persuasion and anti-social behaviour among agents, collaboration with experts in high-stakes decisions, and interpretability. He was previously Head of Research at reciTAL.ai, and held research positions at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, LIP6/Sorbonne, and Fortia Financial Solutions. He began working on computer vision and affective computing at the Intelligent Systems Lab (University of Amsterdam) in 2008, and has since been a visiting researcher at Stanford, MIT Media Lab, and Telefónica Research. He has received awards from ACM DIS (2012), ACM UbiComp (2014), UMUAI (James Chen Annual Award for Best Journal Article, 2016), EACL (2023) and ACM ICMI (Ten Year Technical Impact Award, 2024).
Former Reseachers
Francesco Bagnardi
Francesco Bagnardi obtained a PhD in Social and Political Science at the European University Institute in 2022. He worked as postdoctoral researcher at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence and as research assistant at the University of Padua. His work intersects labour sociology, international political economy, and social movement studies. His research interests include employment informalisation, industrial relations and trade unionism, workers’ agency and mobility, economic and labour geographies, labour and environmental movements. He worked at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Milan firstly within the ERC ‘Seizing the Hybrid Areas of work by Representing self-Employment – SHARE’ project, and then researching industrial relations, labour agency, and just transition in the steel sector. He was a postdoctoral researcher in the project ‘Labor Unions, Migrant workers and ethnic Inequalities’ – LUMINE at the Department of Sociology and Social Research of the University of Trento (October 2025 – August 2026).
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