Vito Laterza | University of Agder (original) (raw)
Vito is Associate Professor in the Department of Global Development and Planning, University of Agder, Norway. In Agder, he leads the Sustainability, Digitalisation and Communication focus area at the Centre for Digital Transformation (CeDiT), and is a member of the university's Battery Coast initiative.
He is currently work package leader in the Horizon Europe project ReMeD - Resilient Media for Democracy in the Digital Age (2023-2026).
He is a co-editor of the Journal of Contemporary African Studies, and a member of the international editorial board of HUMA - The Institute for Humanities in Africa at the University of Cape Town.
He was the founder and chief editor of the public engagement blog Corona Times, a HUMA project, and is currently the chief editor of the science communication blog Democracy in Action, a project of the University of Agder. He writes regularly for national and international media.
He received a BSc in Employment Relations & Human Resource Management from LSE, and an MPhil in Social Anthropological Research and a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge.
Vito is an anthropologist, development scholar and political analyst with an interdisciplinary orientation spanning three main areas: 1) political economy & ecology; 2) digitalisation, new media and communication; and 3) critical higher education studies. His work focuses on: higher education; digital technologies; political communication; local, regional and global sustainable development and green transitions; labour and organisations; socio-economic inequalities; and social and political mobilisation.
His approach is characterised by a systemic integration of ethnography, macro-level structural analysis, and epistemological & reflexive inquiry, in the tradition of “big ideas” social science and social theory.
His early career was characterised by a specialism in southern and central Africa, which over the years has grown into a sustained comparison between Africa and the West. Vito has carried out field research in South Africa, Eswatini, UK, Norway and Italy.
Vito has published widely in leading international journals such as The Journal of Development Studies; The Extractive Industries and Society; Review of African Political Economy;Technology, Pedagogy and Education; and Anthropology Today, and academic presses such as Cambridge University Press; Routledge; and Berghahn.
He held research and teaching positions at the University of Cambridge, University of Oslo, University of Cape Town, University of Pretoria, University of Mauritius, Bristol UWE, and University of Worcester (UK).
Vito's work has been funded by Horizon Europe, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), Jisc (UK), the National Institute of Health Research (UK), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (US), the Joint Committee for Nordic Research Councils in the Humanities and the Social Sciences, the National Research Foundation (South Africa), the Tertiary Education Commission (Mauritius), the SAHEE Foundation (Switzerland) and the Cambridge Newton Trust.
His doctoral research in Cambridge (2005-2011) was an ethnography of timber workers in the Kingdom of Eswatini. He studied in a former asbestos mining town, redeveloped as a social enterprise by white southern African and North American Pentecostal Christian missionaries. For-profit economic activities in the forestry industry were carried out in tandem with orphan care services. The study was extended to the adjacent rural community. Vito developed a grounded approach to foreign investment and donor aid that takes into account labour relations and company’s interactions with local communities, and brings together political economy, political ecology and phenomenological anthropology.
His current work comprises several streams:
Political communication and new forms of social and political mobilisation in Africa and the West, including spontaneous protests, right-wing populism, digital democracy, and environmental activism.
Justice, transparency and geopolitics in global lithium-ion battery value chains: socio-economic and socio-environmental inequalities at multiple scales.
The political economy of African development and underdevelopment from a North-South perspective, with a focus on: race, class and capital; land, labour and migration; and enclave development.
Socio-economic inequalities, economic development, digitalisation and organisational change in higher education in Africa and the Nordic countries.
The role of academic knowledge production and engaged scholarship in the Covid-19 pandemic.
Vito worked with local governments, NGOs, trade unions, social movements, and community organisations in Norway, Europe and southern Africa on issues of digital communications, labour, socio-economic development, organisational change and green economy.
less