Viola Castellano is a social anthropologist whose work examines migration and border policies, welfare systems, and the reproduction of global inequalities. She is currently the Co-PI of a VWS-funded research project investigating the understandings and politicizations of social protection in Germany and Italy. Previously, she conducted DFG-funded research at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Bayreuth, focusing on EU border externalization in Africa and centering the knowledge of those affected by border regimes.
Castellano holds a PhD in Anthropology and Epistemology of Complexity from the University of Bergamo, Italy, which she completed in 2014 after training in Cultural Anthropology at Ca’ Foscari University Venice and the University of Bologna.
Her academic trajectory includes postdoctoral and research positions in diverse international contexts. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (São Paulo Research Foundation) from 2019 to 2021, and has served as Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor at the University of Bologna. She also held a visiting scholar appointment in the Anthropology Department at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY).
Her research employs ethnographic and political-anthropological methods to analyze how legal categories, institutional practices, and policy regimes shape mobility, rights, and social inequalities. This includes studies of asylum systems, return programs, welfare services, racialization processes, and advocacy practices. Methodologically, she fosters collaborative and multimodal approaches, exemplified by the podcast series Backway to Europe: Talking Border and Migration with Gambians on the Move, currently being published by Allegra Lab.
Castellano’s work has been published in journals such as Anthropological Theory, Focaal and Journal of International Migration and Integration. She is the author of the monograph Set to See Us Fail, which examines the US child welfare system, and has contributed to numerous edited volumes on migration and transnational mobilities.
In addition to her academic output, Castellano engages with interdisciplinary and public debates on migration governance, citizenship, and policy, bringing ethnographic insight to questions of rights, exclusion, and social transformation. She is part of Alliance with Refugees in Libya, contributing to Refugees in Libya's collective hotline, campaigns, and publications.
Viola@DAI:
2026 ~Roaming Assembly#33 ~ The Script That Passes Through Here ~ a field of unresolved presence
