Series: Rethinking Informality

Episode 1
In the first episode of “Rethinking Informality”, hosts Miria Gambardella and Daniela D’Urso (MSCA PRESILIENT) are joined by Alena Ledeneva, political sociologist at UCL and founder of the Global Informality Project, whose work has fundamentally reshaped the comparative study of informal practices. The conversation retraces Ledeneva’s intellectual journey into informality, exploring how the concept evolved from the study of everyday practices in the Soviet and post-Soviet context into a broader analytical lens for understanding governance, trust, power, and economic life across societies. The episode examines the ambivalences of informality, its porous boundaries with formality, and its capacity to illuminate how people reproduce and transform existing social and political orders. It also reflects how informality could evolve as an analytical category, asking whether it still retains its critical purchase in a rapidly changing world and what new directions may shape the field in the years to come.
 

Guest

Alena Ledeneva is a Professor of Politics and Sociology at University College London and founder of the Global Informality Project. She authored a trilogy: Russia’s Economy of Favours (1998), How Russia Really Works (2006), and Can Russia Modernize? (2013) and edited three volumes of The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality (2018; 2024). Alongside her academic work, she is a conceptual, mixed-media artist working on informal power and social complexity. In 2019, she participated in the Palace of Ritual, parallel program of the 58th Venice Biennale, at Palazzo Donà Brusa, San Polo. Her first solo exhibition The System Made Me Do It took place at the Galerie de Buci in Paris (2024). Her performances are available at www.alenaledeneva.com.
 
 

Hosts

Miria Gambardella is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Researcher at the Centro per la Cooperazione Internazionale (CCI) and a PhD candidate in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Her research explores informal and autonomous economic practices through long-term ethnographic fieldwork with European social movements and Zapatista communities in Chiapas, focusing on the ethics and politics of coffee circulation. She is part of PRESILIENT, a Horizon Europe MSCA Doctoral Network (Grant Agreement ID 101073394) investigating informality through collaborative research globally.

 
Daniela D’Urso is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie research assistant at the University of Latvia and PhD student at Ku Leuven. She is part of PRESILIENT (EC/MSCA-DN Grant Agreement ID 101073394), a large network committed to exploring informality in 15 different countries. Her work focuses on urban informality in Morocco, examining how different urban spaces regulate, enable, and shape informal practices.