Dr. Elena Apostoli Cappello is a social anthropologist. She works at the University of Rome - La Sapienza (CORiS Department) and is an associate researcher at the LAP (Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Politique, EHESS - CNRS). She analyzes emerging political issues in Europe from an ethnographic perspective: activism, public participation and redefinition of citizenship, eco-socialist movements and the environment. She previously studied circulations between Europe and Latin America: focusing on the study of subjectivization processes in political commitments, she has analyzed intellectual and material circulations, the refoundation of identities, sovereignty and populism, political relations to the land and the politicization of agriculture.
In a first H2020-funded project (G.A. 642018 ), she focused on collective identities, and emancipatory and sovereignist attachments to the land. Within these frameworks, she has analyzed the strategies for locating material and symbolic resources in conflicts for the control and management of territories. Several publications came up in international journals such as Social Anthropology, Ethnologie Française and Ethnologia Europaea.
Through the lens of energy citizenship her current work, funded in H2020 (G.A. 884565) deals with decarbonization policies and democracy, tackling the disconnect between citizens and the formal actors and institutions of representative democracies, to analyze the entanglement between democratic disconnect and sustainability.