Paolo Grassi is an Assistant professor at the University of Milano Bicocca (Department of Human Sciences for Education “R.Massa”).

He has carried out ethnographic research in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala and Italy in the field of urban anthropology, focusing on the relationship between urban space and violence, gangs, youth cultures, and dynamics of socio-economic marginalization.

He was a research fellow at the Politecnico di Milano (2019-2022) and the University of Padua (2017-2019), visiting fellow at the Universidad del Valle de Guatemala (2019), the University of Utrecht (2018) and the Laboratoire Architecture Anthropologie (LAA) de l'École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Paris La Villette (2017).

He has collaborated with the European projects "TRANSGANG: Transnational gangs as agents of mediation", coordinated by the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona and "Gangs, Gangsters, and Ganglands: Towards a Global Comparative Ethnography” coordinated by the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva.

He is the author of articles published in national and international journals and four monographs (including “Terreur à Guatemala-ville: Conflits territoriaux, violence et gangs”, L’Harmattan 2018).

Interviewer: Giovanni Giacalone - South America Team