Skip to main content
Department of Sociology, Politics and International Relations
  1. School of Society and Environment – Department of Sociology, Politics and International Relations
  2. People
  3. Profiles

Dr Giulia Carabelli, PhD (Sociology) Queen's University Belfast

Giulia

Senior Lecturer in Sociology (Social Theory)

Email: g.carabelli@qmul.ac.uk
Room Number: ArtsOne 2.01A

Profile

Giulia is a sociologist whose work brings together social & cultural theory, nonhuman politics, environmental sociology and media studies to showcase her unique and creative approach to cultural studies research. In 2020, she began a research into how people make home with houseplants titled Care for Plants (IG: @careforplants). Articles emerging from this research discuss the practice of plant care as a temporal device that created routines able to re-attune people to plant life beyond the home (The Sociological Review 2025), houseplants as actors in shaping home laboratory where to re-imagine life outside the limits of capitalism (Cambridge Review of Anthropology 2025), and growing plants with students as part of a module on non-human politics as an act to liberate the imagination (Sociology 2025). She is co-editor of Vegetal Futures. Unfurling Worlds to Come, a book about the roles of plants in making the future under contract with Bloomsbury. Giulia has been invited to present her work at The Exploratorium (San Francisco), The Garden Museum London, the South London Botanical Institute, and the Botanist Annual Conference.
Giulia is the Director of the Politics and Sociology undergraduate degree in the School of Society and Environment at QMUL. At QM, she is also the co-director of the "Forum on Decentering the Human" and "the Plant Forum").

Undergraduate Teaching

POL280 Social Theory

POL180 Global Sociology

Research

Research Interests:

ONGOING RESEARCH:

(2020-ongoing) Care for Plants (QUB Covid Response Fund 19/20 and IHSS Large Grant Seed Corn Fund 21/22)

My current research reflects on the roles played by houseplants during the Covid-19 pandemic. It asks why caring for plants became so important to people during social isolation and it studies the affective bonds created between humans and plants in order to account for vulnerability, intimacy, and the emergence of more-than-human solidarities. As part of this project, I am assembling a visual archive of multi-species homemaking practices that is accessible via Instagram IG: CareForPlants 

(2019-ongoing) Feline Diplomacy: Cats and the Critique of Politics 

Drawing on a netnography of cats discussing international political affairs on Twitter, this research explores how the #diplomogs, petfluencers who roam real life British Government buildings, become an interface for voicing critical discourses outside mainstream party politics. I attend to the emergence of the more-than-human in world politics to ask what cats can bring to the body politic and to explore how virtual animal voices become the means of political contestations in a digital world.

COMPLETED RESEARCH:

(2008-2016) Grassroots Activism in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina (various research grants)

I started researching grassroots organising in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina, as a PhD researcher working within the Conflict in Cities and the Contested State team at QUB (2008-13). The project took place through collaboration with Abart Mostar, a platform for art production and urban research that has been active in the city between 2009-2014. This research shaped the writing of my first book, The Divided City and the Grassroots. The (un)making of ethnic divisions in Mostar (2018) and several articles on art-activism and grassroots organising in contested societies. I continued researching the 2014 mass protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina while a Fellow of the Centre for Advanced Studies South-Eastern Europe at the University of Rijeka, Croatia (2015-16).

(2016-2019) “Where time and space are consumed but only the coffee is found on the bill” (funded by the Max Planck Society)

As fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity and a member of the Research Group Empires of Memory, I examined how memories of the Habsburg Empire reverberate in the present of four cities that were key to imperial expansion: Vienna, Budapest, Trieste, and Sarajevo. I developed this comparative research through participant observation in one of the most popular spaces left by the legacy of the Habsburg empire: the Viennese coffeehouse. My aim was to discuss how material and intangible legacies of empire are apprehended in the café, which form relationships with the imperial past that shape urban identities, the sense of belonging to history, and contemporary political discourses. In particular, I was interested in how burgeoning nationalist narratives and practices are energized by the historical reverberation of imperialism, and I traced the connections between the preservation of the coffeehouse as heritage, the celebration of empire, and nationalist discourses in these cities. As part of this research project, I co-edited with Miloš Jovanović two Special Issues on off-centring empire for the journals History of the Present and Cultural Studies (2020).

Examples of research funding:

2020 Queen’s University Belfast – Covid-19 Response Fund with Drs Lisa Smyth and Teresa Degenhardt for three pilot projects on affect, care and vulnerability.

2016-2019 Max Planck Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship, Göttingen (DE).

2015 CAS SEE Postdoctoral Fellowship, University of Rijeka (HR).

Publications

MONOGRAPH

Carabelli, G. (2018) The Divided City and the Grassroots. The (un)making of ethnic divisions in Mostar. The Contemporary City Series, Singapore: Palgrave.

EDITED BOOKS

Carabelli, G., Djurasovic, A. and Summa, R. (2021) Challenging the Representations of Ethnically Divided Cities. Perspectives from Mostar. Routledge (reprint of SI Space and Polity 2019).

Carabelli, G., M. Jovanović, A. Kirbis and J.F. Walton (eds.) (2019) Sharpening the Haze. Visual Essays on Imperial History and Memory. Ubiquity Press.

Carabelli, G. (ed.) (2013) (Re)collecting Mostar. Mostar: Abart.

EDITED JOURNALS

Carabelli, G., Jovanović, M. (2020) Empire Off-Centre: Memory, More-than-Human, and Affect as Imperial Cultural Formations, Cultural Studies 34(5): 675-850.

Jovanović, M., Carabelli, G. (2020) Empire Off-Center: the past and present of empire and colonialism in critical perspective, History of the Present, 10(1): 5-116.

Carabelli, G., Djurasovic, A. and Summa, R. (2019) Challenging the Representation of Ethnically Divided Cities: Perspectives from Mostar, Space and Polity, 23(2): 115-249.

JOURNAL ARTICLES

Carabelli, G. (2025) Teaching with Plants as Liberatory Practice. Posthuman Pedagogies and The Sociological Imagination Sociology. Online First. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380385251392154

Carabelli, G. Making home with plants (pandemic edition) (2025) Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 43(2): 33-51.

Carabelli, G. and Lyon, D. (2025) Time with Houseplants: a sociological analysis of temporalities, affective entanglements and practices of care, The Sociological Review, 73(6): 1441-1459.

Carabelli, G. (2021) Plants, vegetables, lawn. Radical solidarities in more than human worlds, Lateral, Forum The Corona a(e)ffects: radical affectivities of dissent and hope edited by Mattia Fumanti and Elena Zambelli.

Carabelli, G. (2019) Love, Activism and the Possibility of Radical Social Change in Mostar, Space and Polity, 23(2): 182-196.

Carabelli, G. (2019) Habsburg coffeehouses in the shadow of the empire: nostalgia in Trieste revisited, History and Anthropology 30(4): 382-392.

Carabelli, G. and Deiana, M. (2019) Researching (Post)War. A Love story. Journal of Narrative Politics 5(2): 91-101. (Open Access)

Carabelli, G. (2018) (Re)addressing Mostar. Global Imaginaries, Local Activisms. Journal of Urban Cultural Studies, 5(2): 147-165.

Carabelli, G. and Lyon, D. (2016) Young people’s orientations to the future: navigating the present and imagining the future, The Journal of Youth Studies, 19(8): 1110-1127.

Lyon, D. and Carabelli, G. (2016) Researching Young People’s Orientations to the future: The Methodological Challenges of Using Arts Practice, Qualitative Research, 16(4): 430-445.

Carabelli, G. (2013) Living critically in the present: Youth Activism in Mostar (Bosnia Herzegovina), European Perspectives - Journal on European Perspectives of the Western Balkans, 5(1/8): 50-67.

BOOK CHAPTERS (peer-reviewed)

Carabelli, G. (2019) Re-territorialising Empire. Imperial Memories and the Contested History of Forte Ardietti (Italy). In Carabelli, G., Jovanović M., Kirbis A. and Walton J.F. Sharpening the Haze. Visual Essays on Imperial History and Memory. Ubiquity Press, pp. 77-97.

Carabelli, G. (2019) Edible memories: Habsburg imperial cities and their sustained coffee-culture. Möllers, N. Kosmos Kafee (Exhibition Catalogue), Munich: Deutsches Museum. Pp. 58-62.

Carabelli, G. and Lubbock, R. (2017) Neoliberalising Mostar: governmentality, ethno-national division and everyday forms of resistance. Louth, J. and Harrison, K. (eds.) Edges of Identity, Chester: UP, pp. 230-253.

Carabelli, G. (2016) Rubbers, Pens, and Crayons. Rebuilding Mostar through Art Interventions. Vojvoda-Engstler, G. and O’Ciardha, E. (eds.) Politics of Identity in Post-Conflict States. The Bosnian and Irish Experience, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 116-128.

Carabelli, G. (2014) Gdje Si? Walking as a Reflexive Practice. Brown, E. and Shortell, T. (eds.) Walking the City: Quotidian Mobility and Ethnographic Methods, Ashgate, pp. 191-207.

Carabelli, G. and Žuljević, M. (2013) (Re)collecting Mostar. Mapping Public Space to Produce Public Memory. Vockler, K. (ed.) Urban Transformations in South-Eastern Europe, LIT Verlag, pp.102-105.

INTERVIEWS & OPINION PIECES

27 June 2025. Why we should care about houseplants. A guest Blog for the Thinking with Plants and Fungi forum at Harvard University. https://cswr.hds.harvard.edu/news/2025/06/27/why-we-should-care-about-houseplants

07 September 2021. Carabelli, G. Living with houseplants. Pandemic diaries of more than human solidarities, The Sociological Review Magazine

September 2021. Carabelli, G. Image-Maker in Residence: Care for Plants. The Sociological Review

19 October 2020. Carabelli, G., Houseplants were our link with nature in lockdown – now they could change how we relate to the natural world, The Conversation https://theconversation.com/house-plants-were-our-link-with-nature-in-lockdown-now-they-could-change-how-we-relate-to-the-natural-world-147637

22 November 2020. Noi ci prendiamo cura delle piante di casa, però sappiate che sono le piante a curare noi, Elle (in Italian). Interviewed by Daniela Passeri https://www.elle.com/it/lifestyle/verde/a34639216/piante-da-appartamento-lockdown/

28 January 2021. Houseplants. After Dark (a weekly seminar series) produced by The Exploratorium Museum (San Francisco) https://www.exploratorium.edu/video/houseplants-after-dark-online

 

Supervision

Giulia would be delighted to collaborate with doctoral researchers developing work in the Environmental Humanities on themes that intersect her current research interests. 

Public Engagement

Giulia has been recognised as Public Engagement Champion at Queen Mary University in 2025. This is for her sustained work in translating academic conversations about the roles of plants in worldmaking to non-academic audiences. Examples include:

(09-11 September 2025) The Dose: Plant Vitality, Toxicity and Practice. An online, free Symposium organised with Prue Gibson (University of New South Wales) and Matthew Beach.

(June 2024) Where Plants and People Meet. A programme of events and workshops designed for the South London Botanical Institute.

(June-September 2023) Cabinet Cultures. An exhibition on plant value(s) co-curated with Matthew Beach for The Garden Museum, London.

From 2009 to 2013 I collaborated with the platform Abart Mostar to develop the project (Re)collecting Mostar.

Back to top