Dr Olimpia Burchiellaro

Biography

Olimpia Burchiellaro is a Senior Lecturer in Management at the University of Essex. Her research is at the intersection of Anthropology, International Political Economy and International Relations. She has studied corporate investments LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion, and how the growing incorporation of queerness into systems of global capitalist accumulation marks out certain bodies and communities for violence/dispossession. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in cities such as London, Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Nairobi, working with both activists and social movement organisers to contest exclusion in urban settings. Her research works to problematize the management of queerness at different levels, both within and outside the workplace. She has published work in journals including the International Feminist Journal of Politics, Sexualities and Organization Studies. She is the author of 'The Gentrification of Queer Activism' (Bristol University Press, 2023), an ethnographic monograph which traces the closure of queer spaces and the ways in which corporate investments in EDI work to gentrify queer politics and activism in London. She has a BA in Social Anthropology and Politics from SOAS, University of London, and a PhD in Organizations, Economy and Society (School of Social Sciences) from the University of Westminster. Her Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship in Politics and International Relations on global homocapitalism critically analyzed the political economy of corporate investments in LGBTQ+ rights. Olimpia also sits on the Management Committee for The Friends of the Joiners Arms, a Community Benefit Society that aims to open London’s first community-run, community-owned, queer venue. She is also an active member of the International Studies Association (ISA) LGBTQA Caucus.