ACADEMIC | ANTHROPOLOGIST | ZEN PRACTITIONER
About Valentina
Valentina, an anthropologist based in the Americas, explores the operation of race, religion, and Catholicism in the Atlantic and Europe.
She also examines how Radical Compassion manifests in politics, particularly within the context of Migration, Mobility, and Unsettlement, focusing on inclusive and exclusionary dynamics at political, theological, and religious intersections.
Valentina’s interdisciplinary journey bridges various thresholds of sensorial experiences, places, and histories, serving as an author, Professor at the University of Toronto, and a practitioner of Zen, awakening to the intersections between academic realms, public debates on mysticism, politics, migration, and unsettlement, while embracing her diverse Italian, English, Canadian, and Trans-Mediterranean heritages alongside her son, Kamau.
Valentina’s work delves into radical, active dis-imagination and its potential as a current and grounding political force.
How is the Roman Catholic Church a “passionate machine”? How does it reignite a passion for action ? Or a gendering exclusion?
Her work is facilitating creative connections and insights into the sensorial and historical presence of invisible, miraculous worlds and the forms of justice and injustice that are carried out in their names. Her teaching and engagement with the public stem from an intellectual, enliven rigor and an openness and curiosity of the heart on some themes, but not exclusively, of migration and unsettlement, gender and religion, and the power of traces an theologies in the everyday life.
Valentina’s life has been a bridge as an academic, practitioner and traveler into different worlds and heritages.
Sobrepuja con sabiduría los recelos, y goza de lo que es tuyo en esperanza.