Emanuela Guano
Professor Anthropology- Education
PhD, The University of Texas at Austin, 1999
- Specializations
Urban Anthropology & Urban Studies
- Biography
Emanuela Guano’s research interests range from the study of ideology and the built and natural environment to the analysis of spatial practice and discourse, and from the critique of citizenship and the public sphere to the exploration of how gendered subjectivities are crafted in the public realm. In her ethnographies of Buenos Aires, Argentina, Emanuela Guano explored how the city functions as a locus, a medium, and a tool of hegemony and social and political struggle negotiate citizenship and the state through their everyday life. Her Italian research has tackled issues ranging from the gendering of urban space and the everyday practices that surround issues of taxation and citizenship to the contested political imaginaries that may manifest through great events. In this vein, Dr. Guano's 2017 book Creative Urbanity explored how urban revitalization in Genoa, Italy, has prodded the local middle classes to creatively generate venues of self-employment in the attempt to stem their own decline. Based on ethnographic research in Genoa's postindustrial peripheries, Dr. Guano's current project is an analysis of how urban aesthetics may become a terrain for the struggle over the right to the city.
Research Interests
The Social Production of Space; Aesthetics and the Senses; Neoliberal Urbanism; Tourist Studies; Class Identities; Italy.
- Publications
“The Mirror of the Dead: Thanatoptic Storytelling in an Italian Monumental Cemetery.” Anthropology and Humanism, 2022. doi/10.1111/anhu.12369
- “Neoliberal Aesthetics, Dissensus, and the Struggle against Redevelopment in a Postindustrial Periphery,” Space and Culture: An International Journal of Cultural Spaces, 2020; DOI:10.1177/1206331220908212
- Creative Urbanity: An Italian Middle Class in the Shade of Revitalization. Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
- Immaginando Buenos Aires. Ceti medi e modernità urbana. Milan (Italy), Franco Angeli, 2016.
- “Touring the Hidden City: Walking Tour Guides in Postindustrial Genoa,” City & Society, 27:2 (2015): 160-182.
- “Taxpayers, Thieves, and the State: Fiscal Citizenship in Contemporary Italy,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, 75:4 (2010): 377–401.
- “Social Immobility and the Poetics of Contentment in Paolo Virzì’s Caterina va in città,” Studies in European Cinema, 7 (2) (2010): 149-161.
- “Respectable Ladies and Uncouth Men: The Performative Politics of Class and Gender in the Public Realm of an Italian City.” Journal of American Folklore, 120 (475) (2007) 48-72.
- “Fair Ladies: The Place of Middle-Class Women Antique Dealers in a Postindustrial Italian City,” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 13 (1) (2006) 105-122.
- “She Looks at Him with the Eyes of a Camera: Female Visual Pleasures and the Polemic with Fetishism in Sally Potter’s Tango Lesson,” Third Text: Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Art and Culture, 18(5) (2004): 461-474.
- “The Denial of Citizenship: ‘Barbaric’ Buenos Aires and the Middle-Class Imaginary”, City and Society, 1 (2004): 69-97.
- “A Stroll through la Boca: The Politics and Poetics of Spatial Experience in a Buenos Aires’ Neighborhood,” Space and Culture: International Journal of Social Spaces, 6(2003): 356-376.
- “A Color for the Modern Nation: The Discourse on Class, Race, and Education in the Porteño Opposition to Neoliberalism,” Journal of Latin American Anthropology, 8 (2003): 148-171.
- “Ruining the President’s Spectacle: Theatricality and Telepolitics in the Buenos Aires’ Public Sphere,” Journal of Visual Culture, 1 (2002): 303-323.
- “Spectacles of Modernity: Transnational Imagination and Local Hegemonies in Neoliberal Buenos Aires,” Cultural Anthropology, 17 (2002):181-209.
-“Joy:” Murals and the Failure of Post-politics After the Morandi Bridge Collapse,” City & Society, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12442.
- Guano, Emanuela, and Cristina Moretti, 2022 “A Tale of Two Ethnographers: Invisible Cities for Urban Anthropologists,” in Linder, Benjamin (ed.), Urban Dreams: 50 Years of Invisible Cities, Palgrave McMillan, pgs. 117-130.