Three new 'Marie Curie' Fellows at Ca’ Foscari

Ca' Foscari has strengthened its success within the scope of the 'Marie Skłodowska-Curie' funding. In addition to the 23 grants announced last February, there are three new projects for which the European Commission found the necessary resources browsing the ranking of the projects with excellent evaluations. Therefore, researchers Caterina Borelli, Tania Saeed and Camilla Bertolini bring the Venetian university to a total of 26, confirming it as the only Italian University among the best European ones.

Borders and hospitality

Anthropologist Caterina Borelli has won a Global Fellowship, a type of funding for a two-year course at a non-European institution, to be followed by her coming back to Ca' Foscari. She will spend the first two years at the New School of Social Research in New York, and the third year at Ca' Foscari's Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, under the supervision of Professor Fabio Perocco.
For her, this represents a return to the academia after an experience as an independent researcher.

She has designed her three-year BeCamp project as an anthropological approach to the second-line reception system for asylum seekers in two European first arrival countries. The study explores how the multiple control and management devices for asylum seekers and illegalised migrants and the daily adaptation strategies used by the individuals who live within these systems or on their margins change according to various factors, such as political contingencies.

The starting assumption is that borders, far from being mere dividing lines, are much more complex and broader entities, which begin well before and end long after the border in the strict sense, and which follow the migrant over time in the form of welfare systems, bureaucracy, etc.

The networks of populisms

Tania Saeed will come to Ca' Foscari from Pakistan, where she currently holds the position of Associate Professor at the School of Humanities & Social Sciences of Lahore University of Management Sciences. She is an expert in education, terrorism and Islamophobia and has a PhD from Oxford. She has two monographs, numerous publications and awards to her credit.

At the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage, under the supervision of Professor Matteo Legrenzi, she will lead a two-year project on the link between right-wing populism in South Asia and the global networks which have contributed to its success and implications on populism in the Global North.

The project, Inter-Nationalist, will deal with mapping the international network of India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It will analyse the perspectives of young members of groups linked to the party, but also of student associations in India and Pakistan, taking into account several aspects such as gender, religion, caste, class and ethnicity. The output will be a study on populist networks between North and South and on the success of these ideologies among minority communities in the North.

Sustainable aquaculture

Camilla Bertolini, a biologist trained in Plymouth and Belfast, holds a post-PhD from the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research where she carried out research on mussel farming and on how to improve resilience of seabed farming practices, investigating the relationships between density, predators, currents, type of seabed.
At Ca’ Foscari, she will work for two years under the supervision of Professor Roberto Pastres (Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics) on the MAREA project. She will deal with aquaculture, the expansion of which is necessary to respond to the increase in food needs without adding further pressures to fisheries.

Bivalve molluscs aquaculture is considered one of the most sustainable practices, although some negative impacts due to increased organic deposits in the sediment may occur. To limit these impacts, conventional mollusc farming can be combined with an environmental restoration approach. This can bring additional positive effects, such as the return of biodiversity, as well as economic and cultural returns.

The project aims to optimize these effects by integrating environmental restoration and aquaculture through the re-introduction of native oyster beds (Ostrea edulis) using the seabed area under suspended mussel farms, using the recruited oyster seed to start a native oyster farming chain (economic return) keeping the restored seabed intact (ecological return). This will be done by combining modelling with an experimental approach at a pilot site in the Northern Adriatic Sea. Finally, climate change scenarios will be applied to identify the potential of this approach over the long term.