— Mara Benadusi Weaving over the long term as a vital choice
Mara Benadusi at Palazzo Pedagaggi
Department of Political and Social Sciences, Palazzo Pedagaggi, Catania. Catania
Right: “Fera ‘ô Luni” market, Catania;
Left: meeting with students at the “Fera” for an experimental session of the Master’s degree programme in Mediterranean Anthropology.
Mara
with the President of the CSA Association at Zio Turi’s Cantiere Navale Rodolico di (shipyard), Acitrezza, IT.
Friends of the Cantiere Navale Rodolico moving a boat.
Projects must be brought to life, becoming creatures brimming with new possibilities, and not sterile cogs in the machine of academic competition.
‘We become what we do,’ says Mara Benadusi. In order to bring projects, relationships, and transformations to life, we must be there. Over the long term. A timeframe that does not correspond to the rhythms of publications or cycles of funding.
Mara traces the origins of this approach to research back to the 1970s in Borgata Fidene. Her parents, along with other families – following Don Antonio Benazzi, a priest who wanted to work in the suburbs – moved to this neighbourhood outside Rome’s ring road.There was no school in Fidene. The families demanded one and built it themselves. They were engaged in committees, after-school clubs, and community services. Mara lived there until she was fourteen, deeply attached to the neighbourhood yet aware of the differences. Her family was middle-class and intellectual, whereas her friends’ parents were labourers, builders, carpenters, and street vendors. She constantly felt caught between two worlds. This position would become the hallmark of her approach to relationships, building bridges across contradictions.
She enjoyed acting. At eighteen, she enrolled in a school that applied Orazio Costa Giovangigli’s method, based on mimesis. For three years, she trained in choral acting, collectivisation of gesture and speech. Different voices contributing to the development of a single vibration and a shared story.
A book recommended by her drama teacher, Giuseppe Manzari, set her on the path to anthropology. What remained with her from her theatre days was the training and pedagogical approach: tenacity, working with others, and creative improvisation. She applied this to everything; in her projects, she has always sought out diverse groups to forge relationships and build shared understandings through collective harmony.
Since 2008, when she moved to Catania, in Sicily, Mara has developed a distinctive way of understanding and practising university work. Teaching is very intensive, partly because of the experimental component outside the classroom. Exploring the field, working in groups, asking questions, and seeking answers with empathy and discretion. Research pathways intertwine with teaching. She has worked for years in the city’s historic markets, the Pescheria and the Fera ‘ô Luni, running educational workshops and participatory mapping projects alongside secondary school pupils, residents, and street vendors.
These are research projects that must have a long life. Dealing with environmental and climate disasters and imbalances, Mara cannot imagine a complete end to the experiences she initiates, the pathways, and the connections. If you asked people to open up spaces for mutual understanding, you cannot think that responsibility ends when the project ends. She also returns periodically, years later, to her first research site in Sri Lanka.
Her mind is always looking further ahead. When she arrived in Sicily, she was struck by the industrial area around Syracuse, with its smoking chimneys and environmental pollution. In 2014, she began a research project that is still ongoing. She no longer visits the field as frequently as she once did, but she manages to keep track of the ongoing transformations because her German PhD student, Luisa Mohr, is mending the rifts in a region divided between anti-industry activists and those who have lived off the wealth of oil. It is a project of healing that Mara had dreamed of but had not managed to fully realise.
Passing on the baton, continuing longitudinal research – this dimension of duration and weaving – is fundamental to her. Taking on the social and personal fragmentation that contradictions entail: not denying them, but working patiently to mend bonds through them. It is this work of weaving that allows seemingly incompatible realities to be held together, to build connections where others see only fractures.
And then there is the ability to take part in competitive, international projects. European Horizon projects, Marie Curie doctoral consortia – a key to academic competitiveness. Mara prefers to think of this ability as serving people and communities in a vital and nurturing way. Projects must be brought to life, becoming fertile sources of new possibilities, and not sterile cogs in the machine of academic competition.
The challenge is to ensure that projects – even those involving budget management, reporting, and administrative burdens – do not end with the limited duration of the funding but are linked together over the long term. For concrete outcomes, for the processes they can generate, and for the significance they take on for people. To find and instill a profound meaning even in those activities that seem less significant, and in this way, breathe vitality and far-reaching inspiration into them.
For Mara, it is important that her work serves to develop a social narrative from which change and emancipation can spring. As in the Greek chorus, different voices contribute to a collective movement. She wishes to keep open a space for narrative dissonance, transforming it into an opportunity for reflection.
She argues that rigid positions hinder understanding and that to truly understand, one must be able to navigate the cracks in history and the zones of uncertainty with sensitivity and great intellectual humility. In the Syracuse area, Mara met a young activist fighting against industrial pollution and the Mafia. One day he confided in her: “I have this worm in my family: my uncle... his collusion with the Mafia taught me what that world means, and from there I became who I am, not through rejection but through recognition from a distance.”
To recount these life journeys not merely in terms of justice or injustice is to choose to be present. Things are better understood if we explore the grey areas, minute details, and nuances of everyday life. Not portraying champions of good or evil, but dwelling on the contradictions: that is the real challenge.
To be part, not necessarily by taking sides. Other people’s lives do not necessarily reflect our personal views of the world.
If we become what we create, Mara knows how to nurture projects, support them, and participate consistently in their blossoming. She has learned to put her ability to lead complex initiatives at the service of the communities she works with, fostering mutual growth over time. In every gesture, in every relationship, in shared ideas. She knows how to weave collective narratives in which spaces of autonomy emerge, even in the darkest corners. It is worth building together, experimenting, and reshaping until ideas come alive, pulsating. Presence. With energy and passionate vitality.
Mara Benadusi’s key dates
1994-1997 · Theatre training teaches her to understand the world through body, voice and collective work. An influential book sparks an encounter with anthropology: the body as the site where society takes shape.
1998-2002 · A doctorate in anthropology of education sharpens her perspective on how learning occurs: through practice, relationships and extended time. Knowledge as a collectively constructed process.
2004 · The Indian Ocean tsunami directs her research towards a critical study of disasters: inequalities, conflicts and power within reconstruction processes.
2008 · She relocates to Sicily. An interest emerges in industrial landscapes connected to oil refining.
2014 · She begins a research project on late industrialism and energy transition, drawing on collaborative practices.
2022-2026 · European project BioTraCes. Action research in the Simeto Valley, alongside communities defending the river. A shared practice of presence, dialogue and negotiation.