Dear Jon,
As an Italian (but also a British citizen) I have never felt as orientalised as I did reading your email.
Let's establish some facts.
-I have seen no reports anywhere of Giulio Regeni actually being some kind of radical leftist activist who marches in Genoa. I don't know where you got your narrative from.
-Giulio was much less Italian than you seem to portray. He was a PhD student at Cambridge and a graduate of a US college. "Post-Italian" is what is actually currently being used in the Italian press to describe Italian youth going to study abroad because their home country is disinvesting from knowing about the world - especially in the social sciences. Something that I'm sure several people on this list can share.
-Giulio was part of an extremely knowledgeable network of scholars and practitioners in Egypt and in Cambridge, starting from his supervisor Maha Abdelrahman and ending with my friend Gennaro Gervasio, who was the last person to speak to Giulio on January 25th. These people are devastated and deserve our support and solidarity.
- I suspect you don't know what risk assessment was done before Giulio's fieldwork. But I can tell you, as a geographer researching the Middle East and currently with PhD students in the Middle East, that we spend several hours thinking through risk mitigation strategies. I imagine similar procedures are in place at Cambridge. Surely we all recognize the limits of this kind of risk planning and rather than casting blame on Cambridge (or any other university) for sending this naive smiling Italian boy that you describe to his death, we should support each other as academics.
Best wishes,
Sara
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