Francesca Mezzenzana
Francesca Mezzenzana is an anthropologist with an expertise in Latin America. She has a PhD in anthropology from the London School of Economics and is currently the Principal Investigator of the LearningNatures project based at the Rachel Carson Centre. Francesca has conducted fieldwork in the Ecuadorian Amazon since 2011 and in Italy since 2019. Francesca is particularly interested in processes of learning, child socialisation, human-nonhuman relationships and utopian communities. Before joining the RCC, she was a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the School of Anthropology and Conservation of the University of Kent, a Fyssen postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratoire d'Anthropologie Sociale of the Collège de France in Paris and a doctoral fellow at the Musée du Quai Branly. Her research was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, the European Research Council, the Musée du quai Branly, and the National Geographic Society.
She can be contacted at: francesca.mezzenzana@rcc.lmu.de
Her latest publications include:
2023. "Poor brain development" in the Global South? Challenging the science of early childhood interventions. Ethos (with Gabriel Scheidecker, Nandita Chaudhary, Heidi Keller and David F. Lancy)
2022. Conversations on Empathy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Imagination and Radical Othering. London: Routledge (edited with Daniela Peluso).
2022. Just like humans. Similarity, difference and empathy towards nonhumans in the Amazonian rainforest. In Conversations on Empathy: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Imagination and Radical Othering. London: Routledge.
or check out Researchgate: Francesca Mezzenzana
To watch the video “Childhood in the jungle” by LMU, find out more here
Public Writing:
Four Kids Survived 40 Days Alone in the Jungle. The Media Coverage Is Missing Something Big, Slate
