Maura Benegiamo

I am an Assistant Professor in Sociology of Economic and Labour Processes. I earned my PhD in 2016 at the IUAV University of Venice with a dissertation on the political ecology of global land grabbing. Since 2012, I have participated in national and international research projects and conducted fieldwork in Southern Europe, Central America and Sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on extractivism, land and environmental struggles, agricultural development policies, global agro-industry, and the governance of climate change and ecological transitions. From 2014 to 2016, I was a visiting researcher at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. In 2018, I received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Collège d’Études Mondiales – Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. I have worked as a research fellow at the Universities of Milano-Bicocca, Trieste and Pisa and collaborated with diverses European Universities. I serve as co-editor of the Political Ecology book series at Orthotes and I am a member of the Politics-Ontology-Ecology (POE) network.

My research interests include political and decolonial ecology, green capitalism, extractivism and labour-value theory. More broadly, my work examines how the transformations of the value–nature nexus in the context of the climate crisis redefine labour relations, environmental justice and trasform socio-ecological relations of production. My current research focuses on digital agriculture, biocapitalism and the implications of emerging techno-scientific innovations for labour and risk governance in the agribusiness sector. Between 2023 and 2025, I was the Principal Investigator of the PRIN project DiJust. Digital Food and Just Transition. Sustainability and Labour in Agriculture 4.0.

I am the author of two monographs:

- Land, Capital and Extractive Frontiers. Social Conflict and Ecological Crisis in the Senegal River Delta, Bristol University Press, 2025
- La terra dentro il capitale. Conflitti, sviluppoe crisi ecologica nel delta del Senegal, Orthotes, 2021

Journal Articles (selection):

- Agricultural digitalisation and just transition: a framework for the analysis (with A. Corrado and M. Fama), Italian Review of Agricultural Economics, 78(2): 19–31.
- Work and welfare transformations in the climate crisis: A research pathway towards an ecological, just transition, Sociologia del Lavoro.
- The Labor of the Future, the Future of Labor? A Just Transition Critique of the Digital Agriculture Utopia, The Berliner Gazette.
- The long reach of commodity frontiers: social reproduction and food procurement strategies among migrant workers in Kenya’s flower farms, The Journal of Peasant Studies.
- A new food security approach? Continuity and novelty in the European Union’s turn to preparedness (with L. Pellizzoni, L. Centemeri and C. Panico), Agriculture and Human Values.
- The Target Malaria project and the gene drive experiment: for an ontological politics of the neoliberal bioeconomy and its controversies, Rassegna Italiana di Sociologia.
- A Green Economy Failure? Italian Investors In Senegal Between Green Grabbing And Development Promises, Sociologia Urbana e Rurale.
- Cheap flowers and social reproduction: migrant workers’ food strategies at the floricultural frontier of Naivasha, Kenya (with G. Volpato and R. Ellena), Journal of Peasant Studies.
- Agrarian crises and producerist populism in French rural unions (with W. Loveluck), Sociologia del Lavoro, 162: 164–183.
- Ecology, labour and crises: agrarian development and food security, in Handbook of Critical Environmental Politics, Elgar.
- Exploring accumulation in the New Green Revolution for Africa, in Accumulating Capital Today, Routledge (2021).
- Extractivism, exclusion and conflicts in Senegal’s agro-industrial transformation, Review of African Political Economy, 47(166): 522–544 (2020).