Olimpia Burchiellaro is an anthropologist and senior lecturer in Management at the University of Essex, where she teaches modules on the social economy and alternative understandings of value and finance. Her research is on the financialization of queer inclusion, queer political economy, gentrification and queer spaces. She is the author of The Gentrification of Queer Activism (Bristol University Press, 2023) and has published ethnographic work in journals including Sexualities, Organization Studies, and the International Feminist Journal of Politics.
As an Early Career Leverhulme Trust Fellow, Olimpia explored how corporations and international financial institutions (IFIs) manage and extract the value of diversity in cities such as London, São Paulo, Nairobi and Buenos Aires. Her more recent work looks at biodiversity management in conservation projects in North-eastern Brazil, and queer/feminist experiments in urban commoning/community ownership in the UK. Her work leverages insights from both anthropology and queer studies to shed light on value extraction, resource management, and the making of post-capitalist alternatives.
Olimpia is a member of the Centre for Commons Organizing, Value Equalities and Resilience (COVER) and the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizenship (CISC). Her work on gentrification and the queer inclusion in London has been featured in The Guardian, shared with alternative economy organizations such as Stir to Action, in spaces of political education such as The World Transformed, and with community organizers from Planning Aid. The insights from this research are also contained in a BBC Sounds podcast series (Now Here, 2023) on building queer utopias.
At the University of Essex, Olimpia teaches modules on Understanding Value and Values (BE402); Social Economy (BE495); Democracy in Action (BE940/970); and Research Methods (BE425).
Since 2022, she sits on the Management Committee of The Friends of the Joiners Arms, a Community Benefit Society that aims to open London’s first community-run, community-owned, queer pub.
The Gentrification of Queer Activism: Diversity Politics and the Promise of Inclusion in London
The book locates promises of inclusion in a longer trajectory of capitalist accumulation, gentrification, the closure of LGBTQ+ spaces in London & an 'EDI industrial complex’ which seeks to extract the productive value of differences in pursuit of greater profitability. It ethnographically traces how inclusion - understood as a ‘cluster of promises’ - is experienced on the ground and who benefits from the promulgation of these promises.
"Burchiellaro makes a sobering and thorough argument that oppressed people's hopeful visions must surpass their own immediate experiences and conditions, no matter how dire. For without an expansive belief in justice for all, the mere acquisition of some basic rights quickly co-opts radical impulses and shifts our identifications from others on the sidelines of power to the newly welcoming ruling structures that only some will ever occupy." Sarah Schulman, Writer
“We needed this stunningly original and poignant book, and we needed Olimpia Burchiellaro to be the one to write it. She shows us how, between the managerial celebration and critical condemnation of promises of inclusion, there are forms of work and ways of life that, without this book, would continue to get completely occluded.” Melissa Tyler, University of Essex