Carlotta MOLFESE

After receiving an undergraduate degree (BSc) in Marine Biology and Oceanography, and a Master degree (MSc) in Sustainable Environmental Management at the University of Plymouth (UK), Carlotta received a 1 + 3 years studentship from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) to pursue a master degree and a PhD in Human Geography at the same university.

Carlotta completed her PhD in 2023. Her thesis examined the affective journeys, everyday experiences and practices of new farmers, known as "Back-To-The-Land (BTTL) farmers in Anglophone scholarship, and "nuovi contadini" in the Italian context. For her thesis, she developed a distinctive theoretical framework that combined more-than-human and anarchist perspectives in geography, and she applied it to the study of BTTL living using a multi-species, autoethnographic approach. 

Her broader research interests are interdisciplinary, and include: the geographies of agriculture and rural change, alternative food networks (AFN) and new peasant movements, agroecology and human-soil relations, as well as animal and plant geographies. She pursues these intersts through her own experimental practice as a smallholder farmer, and using traditional, participatory and creative methods of social science research. 

Carlotta has presented her research at a number of prestigious international conferences, including the Annual Conferences of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS-IBG) and the American Association of Geographers; and she has published a chapter from her thesis in the volume "Critical Geographies of Resistance" edited by Sarah M. Hughes. 

More recently, she has worked for the South West Doctoral Training Partnership (SWDTP) to develop, organise and chair a webinar series on the intersections between academic research and activism; and she is currently working on a two-year long, PRIN-funded research project at the University of Venice entitled "Farms on the move. Rethinking the geographies of transhumance's community-based economies: a more-than-human approach".