Michela Ardizzoni

Biography

Michela Ardizzoni is an associate professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. She received her Ph.D. in Media Studies from Indiana University-Bloomington and her MA in American Studies from the University of Iowa. Her research focuses on global media, and media activism, marginality, and feminism. Her study of Italian television North/South, East/West: Mapping Italianness on Television was published in 2007. She is the co-editor of Beyond Monopoly: Globalization and Contemporary Italian Media (2010) and Mediterranean Encounters in the City (2015). Her research has also appeared in several media journals, such as Journalism, Jump Cut, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies, International Journal of Communication, and Communication, Culture and Critique. Her most recent book, Matrix Activism: Global Practices of Resistance (2017), examines contemporary forms of media activism in Italy, North Africa, Senegal, and the US. She’s currently working on two book-length projects on the politics and economies of expendability and superfluity of vulnerable bodies as they are represented in contemporary media and on Afro-Italian artists and their creative practices of resistance.

Books:

• Matrix Activism: Global Practices of Resistance, Routledge, 2017.
• Mediterranean Encounters in the City: Frameworks of Mediation between East and West, North and South, co-edited with Valerio Ferme, Lexington Books, 2015.
• Beyond Monopoly: Globalization and Contemporary Italian Media, co-edited with Chiara Ferrari, Lexington Books, 2010.
• North/South, East/West: Mapping Italianness on Television, Lexington Books, 2007.

Special Journal Issue:

• Co-editor, “Voices of Dissent: Activists’ Engagements in the Creation of Alternative, Autonomous, Radical and Independent Media” Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements 2(2): 2010.

Selected Articles and Chapters:

• “Laughing at the Other: Islam in Italian Cinema” in K. Petersen (Ed.), Muslims in the Movies: A Global Anthology, Harvard University Press (forthcoming in Sept. 2020).
• “Feminist Citizenship in the Banlieue: Houda Benyamina’s “Divines” (2016)” in R. Mielusel and S. Pruteanu (Eds.), Citizenship and Belonging in France and North America Multicultural Perspectives on Political, Cultural and Artistic Representations of Immigration. Palgrave (2020), pp. 135-149.
• "On Rhythms and Rhymes: Poetics of Identity in Postcolonial Italy" Communication, Culture and Critique, 13 (1): 1-16, March 2020.
• “Matrix Activism: Media, Neo-Liberalism, and Social Action in Italy” International Journal of Communication, 9 (2015): 1-20.
• “Narratives of Change, Images for Change: Contemporary Social Documentaries in Italy” Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 1.3 (2013): 311-326.
• “Tactical Media Practices in Italy: The Case of Insu^Tv” Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism 14.7 (2013): 868-884.
• “Borderless Nationalism: RAI’s Transnational Brand” in Commercial Nationalism: Selling the Nation and Nationalizing the Sell, Mark Andrejevic and Zala Volcic (eds.), Palgrave McMillan, 2015, pp. 131-146.