Marianna is a LISS-DTP funded PhD candidate in the Department of War Studies. Her research looks at global histories and geographies of mobility control, with a particular focus on the politics of death and abandonment in contemporary sea-crossings and shipwrecks in the Mediterranean.

Marianna is part of the ‘Doing IPS’ PhD Seminar Series 2024-25. She is the co-convenor for the symposium and exhibition titled ‘The Slipperiness of Empathy: Navigating through Seas of (In)Visibility and Erasure’, which will take place in January 2025 at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge.

Marianna holds a BA in Political and Social Sciences from Sciences Po Paris (Nancy campus), where for her third year, she read Italian, German, and Spanish at the Modern and Medieval Languages Department at the University of Cambridge. Marianna then completed an MSc in International Relations (Research) at LSE and an MA in International Conflict Studies at King’s.

Marianna worked as a migration politics researcher for an Italo-German think-tank based in Italy. She has extensive editorial experience as an editorial board member for Millennium: Journal of International Studies at LSE and senior editor for a legal research platform in the fields of data protection, cybersecurity, whistleblowing, and AI. She is fluent in English, German, Italian, French, and Spanish.

Research Interests

• Migration, bordering, and colonial histories and geographies in the Mediterranean
• Death, necropolitics, and racialising assemblages
• Arts-based methodologies

Thesis title

Complicating Necrogeographies: A Reimagining of Contemporary Shipwrecks in the Mediterranean

Abstract

Drawing on Mbembe’s necropolitics (2019) and Weheliye’s concept of ‘racializing assemblages’ (2014), my project explores the Mediterranean basin as an ever-unfolding necrogeography that entwines aqueous, coastal, and terrestrial landscapes and binds the historical to the contemporary moment. Grounded in the context of the 2023 Cutro Shipwreck in Southern Italy, I trace how carceral and extractive mechanisms sustain racial-colonial topographies of exploitation, containment, and forced displacement across time and space.

Through this necrogeographical lens, I gesture towards the rhizomatic entanglements between the politics of death and mobility control enfolding the sea, shores, and land. My project reads art and cultural productions on the Cutro Shipwreck as speculative narrations (Hartman, 2008) with and against ethnographic insights and a genealogical analysis of contemporary sea-crossings and shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. I interrogate their representation in a way that troubles dominant aesthetic and epistemic canons and resists flattened framings of death. In so doing, I complicate linear Euro- and terra-centric narrative arcs that conceal and legitimise necropolitical violence in the form of abandonment, neglect, and systemic erasure within the global border regime and begin to imagine otherwise.

Supervisors

• Dr Stephan Engelkamp
• Dr Leonie Ansems de Vries

Research Centres & Groups

• Research Centre in International Relations (RCIR)
• Arts & Conflict Hub

Projects

Connecting Education for Sustainability and Cultural Competency at King’s