Paolo Gruppuso

Paolo Gruppuso is an anthropologist interested in environmental conflicts, sustainable agriculture, food systems, and the environmental and social history of wetland conservation and land reclamation. He studied Social Anthropology at the University of Aberdeen, obtaining his PhD in 2016 with a dissertation on environmental conflicts between farming and nature conservation in two protected wetlands of Agro Pontino, Italy. Based on extensive archival and ethnographic research, his thesis is an in-depth study of how wetlands emerged over time as entanglements of landscape policy, local use, and environmental ethics. He has published articles on environmental conflicts in the Anthropocene in Conservation & Society, and on the relations between history and geology in wetlands, Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo, amongst others.

At the MPIWG he is in the ART OF JUDGEMENT working group in Department III, and his research deals with the history of wetland conservation in the wider fields of conservation science and environmentalism. From 2013 to May 2018, he was affiliated to the European Research Council project “Knowing From the Inside: Anthropology, Art, Architecture and Design,” based at Aberdeen University. He is currently a Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Aberdeen, and since 2017 he collaborates with the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo, Italy.