Chiara Certomà’s research interests focus on the contemporary evolution of political ecology and critical geography. Recently she has worked on a project investigating the increasingly dominant role of geographical perspectives in the elaboration of post-environmental theory and conducts a PhD course in Environmental Politics at the Sant´Anna School of Advanced Studies (SSSUP), Pisa—where she is a post-doctoral research fellow. Along with her academic work, she has both consulted for and collaborated with some of the largest environmental NGOs in Italy (Legambiente, Greenpeace, ASud. Ecologia e Cooperazione, and Fondazione Diritti Genetici) and carried out research on environmental sustainability in deteriorated urban areas for certain administrative bodies in Rome.
Certomà graduated from La Sapienza University of Rome with a degree in the philosophy of science, and obtained a MA in environmental communication from the University of Pisa. In 2009 she received her PhD from the SSSUP, Political Science Department. In her doctoral dissertation Certomà used environmental thought as a conceptual frame to investigate the politics of knowledge at the center of disagreements over the management of space and chart the great diversity of opinion over the kinds, meaning, and significance of place authenticity for different actors involved in preserving, planning, or contesting the shape of their own places. Chiara was a visiting fellow in the Geography Department at The Open University, has taken part in courses, workshops, and conferences in the United Kingdom, France, Switzerland, Cyprus, Spain, Singapore, and Germany, and spent a research period at the Université Paris ‘La Sorbonne’.
Her current research focuses on the material semiotic transformation of socio-environmental relationships in global cities, investigating the spatial practices aimed at readdressing social inequalities in marginalized urban areas.