Krause Publishes in Book on Italian Politics

Content

Elizabeth Krause, anthropology, has contributed a chapter to New Anthropologies of Italy: Politics, History and Culture. The volume is open access and free to download from Berghahn Books. 

“Anthropologists working in Italy are at the forefront of scholarship on several topics including migration, far-right populism, organized crime and heritage," writes volume editor Paolo Heywood. "This book heralds an exciting new frontier by bringing together some of the leading ethnographers of Italy and placing together their contributions into the broader realm of anthropological history, culture and new perspectives in Europe."

Professor Krause’s chapter, “‘An Unjustified Revolt’: Political Discourse and Chinese Migrant Resistance to Inspection Culture,” sheds light on protest and politics in contemporary society and extends an anthropological study of Italy to a transnational scale. She raises pertinent questions about the limits of democracy and who has the right to protest through an analysis of the political discourse connected with a series of events: in the heart of metropolitan Tuscany, Chinese migrants (active producers in the "Made In Italy" fashion sector) clashed with Italian health inspectors and riot police, culminating in a protest that turned violent. Krause compares the Italian political characterization of Chinese migrants’ protest as “an unjustified revolt,” with Chinese social media discourse that justified the protest. Krause argues that Italian political discourse appealed to “common sense” to rationalize the politics of inspection and demonize migrant resistance.

Krause’s research focuses on population politics: reproduction (such as the biopolitics of low fertility among Italians), migration (as with overseas Chinese in Italy), and parenting young Latinas in Massachusetts. She is a 2024 recipient of the Samuel F. Conti Faculty Fellowship Award.