Giorgio Pirina is a fixed-term research fellow in the sociology of work and economic processes at the University of Bologna, where he works on the Di-GROWTH project – Sustainable Digital Growth in Italy’s digital and platform economy. The project aims to analyse how the expansion of the data-centre sector concretely affects the labour market and the ecological transition, as well as the socio-territorial impacts of data centres.
His research interests focus on the exploitation of human and environmental resources along value chains, with particular attention to the role played by new digital technologies. In particular, he has studied transformations in work and socio-ecological change within platform capitalism. He has worked on these topics since his Master’s degree (2016), for which he defended a thesis entitled Towards a Sociology of Materiality: The Tantalum Supply Chain from Mines to ICTs, advancing a critique of the rhetoric of immateriality in the information society. Since 2022, he has been involved in research on territorial inequalities in “left-behind” places as part of the EXIT project – Exploring Sustainable Strategy to Counteract Territorial Inequalities.
He is the author of Connessioni globali. Una ricerca sul lavoro nel capitalismo delle piattaforme (Franco Angeli, 2022) and Nocività digitale. Sul nesso lavoro-ecologia (forthcoming, Edizioni Ca’ Foscari).
Among other roles, he is a member of the scientific committee of the “Ecologia Politica” series (Orthotes) and of the editorial board of the “Ritratti” series (Rosenberg & Sellier). Since 2023 he has been Managing Editor of Inequalities – Journal of Critical Inequality Studies.
