Francesca Menichelli

Francesca Menichelli is a Ph.D. candidate in urban sociology at the University of Milano-Bicocca, where she is working under the supervision of Professor Fabio Quassoli. Francesca received her BA in Communication from the University of Siena and attended the University of Bologna for her MA, where her interest in the topics of surveillance and security first emerged. For her Masters thesis she studied the security system of a mid-sized airport in Northern Italy and she is further pursuing these themes in her Ph.D. at the University of Milano-Bicocca, where she has spent the last two years focusing on the topics of social control, surveillance and crime, with particular emphasis on video surveillance.

For her doctoral thesis she is conducting comparative research on how public area video surveillance has transformed the ways in which control and authority are exercised over territory. This comparative work specifically intends to take into account the role played by locally-grounded political cultures. Having completed the fieldwork components of her research, she joined the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University as a visiting research student until November 2011, working under the supervision of Dr. David Murakami Wood.