Dr Torino is a Lecturer in the Department of Geography interested in the spatial politics of migration, race, displacement, and spatial agency, and how these relate to the urban. She joined King's in September 2023, following a Junior Research Fellowship at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge (2021-23), where she obtained her PhD in 2021.

Prior to that, Dr Torino worked at the University of Cambridge as Teaching Associate (Department of Politics and International Studies), at the New York City Department of City Planning, and for an architecture NGO in Benin. Her research has been funded by grants from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UKRI), the Society for Latin American Studies, and the Kettle Yard's Arts Fund. Her interdisciplinary research has appeared on Social and Cultural Geography, Dialogues in Human Geography, Identities, the South Atlantic Quarterly, and the Journal of Latin American Studies, among others.

Research

• Migration and global displacements
• Camps, margins, and spaces of (urban) liminality
• Race, racialisation, and racial capitalism
• Spatial justice, agency, and the Right to the City
• Ethnicity and urban multiculture
• Urban policy, planning, and governance

Dr Torino investigates the intersecting dynamics of migration, race and racism, urbanisation, and socio-political transformation, with a focus on the Mediterranean, Europe, and Latin America.

She is PI on a British Academy project that explores how racial capitalism and global displacements reshape urban (and agro-urban) peripheries in Southern Europe, engaging contested spaces of resistance, governance, and precarity.

Previously, she worked with grassroots Afro-Colombian and women collectives in Bogotá, researching socially engaged art practices for intersectional justice and human rights, and relational spaces of solidarity in pluri-ethnic cities.

Her doctoral work was an ethnographic study of the racialised socio-politics of displacement in Bogotá, focussing on the spatial agency of racialised minority groups, the relation between race-making and city-making in urban planning and everyday urbanism, and the governmentality of multiculturalism.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• 4SSG1014 Geographical Foundations
• 4SSG1016 Geography in Action
• 4SSG1008 Fieldtrip
• 5SSG2063 BA Geography Research Tutorials
• 6SSG3072 Right to the City

Undergraduate/Postgraduate

• 6SSG3076/7SSGN212 Critical Geopolitics

PhD Supervision

Dr Torino is currently considering doctoral applications on:

• Spaces of race and racism
• Multiculture and governance
• Displacement urbanisation (within and beyond the city)
• Human rights in cities

Further details

See Giulia's research profile