Cinzia Solari
Biography
Cinzia D. Solari (pronounce) is Associate Professor of Sociology at UMass Boston. She is a feminist ethnographer whose work has focused on post-Soviet peoples as they make their way in a capitalist world. Dr. Solari has used the tools of global ethnography to investigate the intersections of migration, modernity, and neoliberal capitalism. Recent investigations into how pro and anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric is deployed by nation-states in the international area have led to her current research which focuses on nonbinary and transgender youth. She is a first-generation scholar.
Area of Expertise
Feminist intersectional theory; migration; transnational nation-state building; post-Soviet transformation; neoliberal capitalism; global ethnography; nonbinary and transgender kids.
Regional expertise: Ukraine and the former Soviet Union; Europe
Degrees
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
BA, Brown University
Professional Publications & Contributions
Books
- Radhakrishnan, Smitha and Cinzia D. Solari (equal coauthors). 2023. The Gender Order of Neoliberalism. Polity Press.
- Winner, 2024 Immanuel Wallerstein Book Award, Political Economy of the World System Section (PEWS) of the American Sociological Association (ASA)
- Solari, Cinzia D. 2017. On the Shoulders of Grandmothers: Gender, Migration, and Post-Soviet Nation-state Building. Routledge.
- Winner, 2020 Mirra Komavrsky Book Award, Eastern Sociological Society (ESS)
Peer-reviewed Articles and Essays (selected)
- Radhakrishnan, Smitha and Cinzia D. Solari (equal coauthors). "Beyond #Girlboss and #Tradwife: Reclaiming Joy from our Feminist Imaginaries." forthcoming, Contexts Magazine: Sociology for the Public.
- Solari, Cinzia D. (first author) and Skylar Rathvon. 2024. Cedarwood Public High School Equity Report: Focus on Trans and Nonbinary Students. Conference papers – American Sociological Association, 1-40.
- Solari, Cinzia D. 2023. “Gender, Modernity, and Russia’s War on Ukraine.” Footnotes: A Magazine of the American Sociological Association 51(1). o
- reprinted in Italian: “Geopolitica dell’omofobia.” InGenere.
- Solari, Cinzia D. 2019. “Transnational Moral Economies: The Value of Monetary and Social Remittances in Transnational Families.” Current Sociology 67(5):760–77.
- Solari, Cinzia D. 2016. “Theorizing the Ukrainian Case: Pushing the Boundaries of Migration Studies.” In Transformation of Ukrainian Migration to the European Union: Insights and Lessons, edited by F. Olena and K. Marta: Switzerland: Springer International Publishing, Pp. 215-227.
- Radhakrishnan, Smitha and Cinzia Solari (equal coauthors). 2015. "Empowered Women, Failed Patriarchs: Neoliberalism and Global Gender Anxieties." Sociology Compass 9(9):784-802.
- Solari, Cinzia. 2014. “Prostitutes” and “Defectors”: How the Ukrainian State Constructs Women Emigrants to Italy and the USA.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 40:1817-1835.
- Solari, Cinzia. 2011. "Between ‘Europe’ and ‘Africa’: Building the New Ukraine on the Shoulders of Migrant Women." In Mapping Difference: The Many Faces of Women in Ukraine, edited by Rubchak, Marian J. Berghahn Books, P. 23-40.
- Solari, Cinzia. 2010. “Resource Drain vs. Constitutive Circularity: Comparing the Gendered Effects of Post-Soviet Migration Patterns in Ukraine.” Anthropology of East Europe Review 28: 215-238.
- Solari, Cinzia. 2006. "Transnational Politics and Settlement Practices: Post-Soviet Immigrant Churches in Rome." American Behavioral Scientist 49:1528-1553.
- Solari, Cinzia. 2006. "Professionals and Saints: How Immigrant Careworkers Negotiate Gendered Identities at Work." Gender & Society 20: 301-331.
Additional Information
Dr. Solari's most recent book with Smitha Radhakrishnan, The Gender Order of Neoliberalism (Polity Press 2023) is winner of the 2024 Immanuel Wallerstein Book Award, Political Economy of the World System Section (PEWS) of the American Sociological Association (ASA). The book argues that our Western understandings of neoliberalism do not travel well because we have only acknowledged one of neoliberalism's pre-histories, liberalism, and we must recover socialism and post-colonialism which also shaped the transnational networks that "cooked up" neoliberalism and our current world order. Placing three world regions in conversation—the US, the former Soviet Union, and South and Southeast Asia—reveals that gender is foundational to making the neoliberal global order work. The erasure of collective transnational organizing, and particularly the erasure of the Soviet Union from our collective knowledge, has made it seem there is nothing outside neoliberalism. The authors show that templates for feminist imaginings of an anti-capitalist, anti-racist world already exist and must be recovered to create a fairer future.
Dr. Solari's first book, On the Shoulders of Grandmothers: Gender, Migration, and Post-Soviet Nation-State Building, won the 2020 Mirra Komavrsky Book Award from the Eastern Sociological Society (ESS). Through in-depth interviews and ethnographic work with migrant grandmothers caring for the elderly in Italy and California and their adult children in Ukraine, On the Shoulders of Grandmothers investigates how migrant grandmothers built the "new" Ukraine from the outside in through transnational networks. By comparing the experiences of individual migrants in two different migration patterns—one a post-Soviet "exile" of individual women to Italy and the other an "exodus" of families to the United States—Dr. Solari exposes the production of new gendered capitalist economics and nationalisms that precariously place Ukraine between Europe and Russia with implications for the global world order. This global ethnography illuminates the larger context of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
View Professor Solari's Curriculum Vitae
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