Valeria Piro obtained her PhD in Sociology in 2015 at the University of Milan. She then worked as a postdoctoral researcher and teaching fellow at the University of Bologna (2016-2018), Padova (2018-2021) and Milan (2021-2022). Moreover, she was a visiting scholar at the C.R.I.M.T. (Montréal), and C.E.R.I.C. (Leeds).
Her research interests articulate in three main directions. The first research axis, within the Labour Processes Theory, investigates workforce segmentation according to race, nationality, migration status, age, and gender. The second focus of interest concerns workers’ agency, by investigating everyday conflicts and informal bargaining practices within workplaces, as well as workers’ mobility power. The third area of interest focuses on processes of unionisation, on trade unions’ strategies in enlarging their membership and innovating their practices, and on emerging forms of labour organising (i.e., grassroots organisations, ‘indie’ unionism). Her research has privileged qualitative and ethnographic methodologies, and included several industries, especially migrant-rich sectors (agriculture, meat processing, manufacturing, and services); moreover, she extensively investigated subcontracted and informal labour.
As a member of the SHARE team, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the University of Milan. In particular, she carried out ethnographic fieldwork in the Netherlands (2021-2022), where she was hosted as visiting scholar at the Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Labour Studies (AIAS-HIS).
She is currently Assistant Professor at the Dept. of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology at the University of Padova, where she is also a member of the group S.L.A.N.G. (Slanting Gaze on Social Control, Labour, Racism and Migration).
E-mail: valeria.piro@unipd.it