Julian Lovreglio
Italian National Research Council & Sapienza University of Rome
Julian Lovreglio is a member of the CRITICAL research group, working under the Illicit Labour: Unveiling the dark sides of the photovoltaic industry project, while completing a PhD in Economic Geography at Sapienza University of Rome in affiliation with the Italian National Research Council (IRPPS-CNR). His research examines the political economy and political ecology of renewable-energy transitions, focusing on how solar development reshapes territories, labour, livelihoods, and relations of power. His research focuses on the project development stage of the solar Global Production Network and he has investigated the interplay between the more intangible discursive and imaginative dimension of the solar industry and their materialization into infrastructures, policies, markets, opportunities, and injustices.
His doctoral research follows solar-energy transformations across Italy, France, and Brazil. It explores agrarian and territorial conflicts surrounding large-scale photovoltaic development, the governance of agrivoltaics, community-led social solar application, solarpunk futures, and the competing imaginaries through which energy futures are constructed and contested. More broadly, Julian is interested in the tension between renewable energy as a new frontier of capitalist accumulation and its potential to support alternative, locally grounded ways of organising social and economic life. Working across different countries, languages, and research communities has shaped his comparative approach and his interest in how global transformations are experienced in particular places.