My name is Francesco Colona and I am an academic researcher and teacher based in the Netherlands. Broadly speaking, my work is situated in the social sciences and I think of myself as an interdisciplinary researcher. I am interested in how the technological and material aspects of life interfere and generate governance processes. In my latest research I explore how different research infrastructures in marine science (ranging from ocean-going research vessels to scientific diving operations) influence the research process and its scientific concerns. This is an ethnographic project where I aim to investigate how research infrastructures impact the way oceans and the marine environment are visualised for different audiences: academic, policy and lay audiences. This project is funded by a Marie-Curie Individual Fellowship and conducted at the Centre for Science and Technology Studies at Leiden University (the Netherlands) where I joined the FluidKnowledge team.
In my previous research at Linköping University, in the department of Thematic Studies - Technology and Social Change (Sweden), I have been looking at urban decarbonisation policies in a Swedish city. During this research I approached the decarbonisation policy as a practice and a process that enrols not only the policy makers, but also organisational structures, ways of knowing the target population of policies, digital technologies, among other serendipitous and heterogeneous elements. During my PhD at the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands), I focused my research on security technologies and materialities in Nairobi, Kenya (from barbed wire to guns, from police cars to cameras, etc.). In my doctoral dissertation I show how the “state” is an achievement of security practices that enact different political subjects as belonging (and therefore in need of protection) or not belonging (and therefore as threatening and dangerous).
I am currently an assistant professor of Human Geography at the Geography, Spatial Planning and Environment Department of Radboud University, the Netherlands and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research fellow at Leiden University.
In my academic career I have been teaching on various subjects at bachelor, master and PhD levels: From research design and methodologies of social science research to the role of scientific expertise in a post-truth era; From excursion courses in post-conflict areas to social theory courses. And I enjoyed them all!
