Stefano Portelli

Stefano Portelli is a researcher in urban anthropology, primarily interested in the social effects of urban displacement. He is affiliated with the Department of Geography at the University of Leicester, where he undertook his postdoctoral research project in partnership with Harvard’s Department of Anthropology, and worked on the cultural impacts of gentrification on gnawa rituals and subculture in Casablanca, Morocco. He was one of the organizers of Repensar Bonpastor, a collaborative experiment to prevent displacement in a Barcelona neighborhood, and of Harvard’s 2019 Urban Activism Conference. He co-founded the working groups Perifèries Urbanes and Observatori d’Antropologia del Conflicte urbà in Barcelona, and wrote La ciudad horizontal (Bellaterra, 2015), an ethnography on the demolition of a Barcelona working class neighborhood. He currently works with Istituto di Studi Politici S.Pio V and collaborates with a Rome-based network of housing activists in preventing the eviction of vulnerable tenants through UN human rights protections.

Personal site: periferiesurbanes.org/stefano