Let them call me
a frontier methodologist.

Mission

Methodology as a critical space.

I came to methodology almost by accident. I enrolled in communication sciences wanting to become a radio artistic director. Then I encountered social research methodology through M.C. Pitrone's lectures, and something changed.

That is how it usually goes: you cannot really discover methodology before you encounter it. It is not taught in secondary school. By the time you meet it at university, you already have other plans. Most people just want to pass the exam and move on: the subject is unusual, demanding, unlike almost anything else in the curriculum. Only a few get genuinely hooked. I was one of them.

What hooked me was this: methodology is not a set of procedures to apply. It is the space where you decide what can be observed, how it can be classified and what will count as evidence. Every methodological choice has theoretical, empirical and ethical consequences, consequences that rarely make it into published results, but shape them entirely.

The frontier I work on today runs largely through digital environments. New tools and AI systems change not only how we collect data, but what questions become askable and what remains out of reach. That is why I have moved toward studying how technologies transform empirical practice: not as an external force acting on research, but as something entangled with it from the inside.

And it is also why the quality of researchers' lives matters to me. The people doing this work are not interchangeable. Their institutional pressures, precarious contracts and daily conditions shape what gets studied and how. In Italy especially, the gap between researchers' working conditions and those in other countries is well documented, and still underexamined as a methodological variable in its own right.

The three things I study - methodological innovation, digital technologies and researchers' lives - are connected by the same question: what are the actual conditions under which we produce knowledge, and what do they cost us?

Building scientific communities where these questions can be asked honestly, not just through competition and specialization but through genuine exchange, is for me the practical conclusion of taking methodology seriously.