Giorgia Aiello | Università degli Studi di Milano - State University of Milan (Italy) (original) (raw)

Giorgia Aiello is Full Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Milan, Italy. She was Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University of Bologna from 2020 to 2023, and between 2010 and 2023 she also worked at the University of Leeds, UK, where in 2020 she was promoted to Full Professor in the School of Media and Communication. She is currently Visiting Professor at the University of Leeds. Giorgia obtained her BA and MA from the University of Bologna and her Ph.D. from the University of Washington (Seattle, USA). She has held visiting fellowships in New York, Antwerp and Paris.

Her research focuses on the problems and potentials of visual communication in the construction and promotion of social, political and cultural identities in digital media, cities and everyday life. Her current research projects focus on the role of generic images in contemporary culture, stock photography and data visualization in digital journalism, and the visual-material dimensions of the urban built environment.

Giorgia is broadly interested in how aesthetics shape and are shaped by political, economic, and cultural agendas, and she has an established international reputation for her work on visual images, urban space, and multimodal design. Her work aims to uncover how identities are formed, how both difference and diversity are negotiated, and how inequalities are maintained or overcome through media and communication. She adopts a critical and empirical framework rooted in social semiotics, critical discourse analysis, and cultural sociology, using a challenging and innovative combination of both textual and digital methods with ethnography, political economy, and phenomenology.

Giorgia has written about branding, photography, data visualization and cities, on institutions like the European Union and Magnum Photos, and on corporations such as Starbucks and Getty Images. She is the lead editor of Communicating the City: Meanings, Practices, Interactions (with Matteo Tarantino and Kate Oakley; Peter Lang, 2017) and a co-author of Visual Communication: Understanding Images in Media Culture (with Katy Parry; forthcoming with SAGE). Her essays have been published in Visual Communication, Social Semiotics, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Social Media + Society, New Media & Society, Journal of Language and Politics, Information, Communication & Society, European Journal of Cultural Studies, and many other peer-reviewed journals and edited collections. She has also guest-edited special issues of journals like Visual Communication, International Journal of Communication, and Media, War & Conflict.

Giorgia has received several recognitions for her scholarship, including a four-year grant from the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme for the project “Globalization, Visual Communication, Difference” (2011-2015) and a best essay award from the National Communication Association’s Visual Communication Division in 2012 for her article “The ‘other’ Europeans: The semiotic imperative of style in Euro Visions by Magnum Photos”. She has also been a Co-I in the AHRC-funded project "Generic Visuals in the News: The role of stock photos and simple data visualizations in assembling publics".

She is on the editorial boards of Journal of Communication, Communication Theory, Visual Communication, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, Journa of Visual Political Communication, International Journal of Cultural Studies, Social Semiotics, Visual Communication Quarterly, and Etnografia e Ricerca Qualitativa. She has also been a reviewer for a wide range of journals including Popular Communication, Space and Culture, International Journal of Communication, and Television and New Media. Giorgia has been invited to speak at universities, conferences, and workshops in Belgium, Denmark, Hong Kong, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. From 2013 to 2017 she was Vice-Chair and Chair of the International Communication Association’s Visual Communication Studies Division.

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