Caterina Scaramelli

Research Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Areas of Expertise Anthropology of environment, science, infrastructure, Turkey, Europe, Middle East, Mediterranean

Recent Publications

Scaramelli, Caterina. How to Make a Wetland: Water and Moral Ecology in Turkey. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2021.

Scaramelli, Caterina. “The Lost Wetlands of Turkey.” MERIP, no. 296 (Fall 2020). https://merip.org/2020/10/the-lost-wetlands-of-turkey/

Scaramelli, Caterina. “The Delta is Dead: Moral Ecologies of Infrastructure in Turkey.” Cultural Anthropology 34, no. 3 (2019): 388–416. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca34.3.04.

View Professor Scaramelli’s CV

Current Research
Broadly, my research centers on mutual constitutions of ecologies, scientific expertise, and infrastructures as conduits for people’s moral claims about human and non-human livelihoods. I am completing a research project that examines the dynamic multivalence of wetlands. In Turkey, as in many other places, the wetland became an important site of everyday contestations over new and foreclosed possibilities in a time of uncertain politics and in precarious and rapidly changing environments. Wetland conservation has often reinvented and repurposed older tools of swamp reclamation to legitimize technocratic environmental management. At the same time, various social groups have also found in the wetland a fertile yet uncertain, murky, and mobile ground for cultivating new aspirations of democracy, multispecies livelihoods, and more just ecologies. I am also embarking on a new ethnographic research project on ecological precarity and mobility. In this new project, I will examine the cultural and political significance of “heirloom” seeds in the Mediterranean to explore changing experiences of health, precarity, labor, nation, race, and belonging.