Noemi Casati is a sociologist and postdoctoral researcher with the ERC-funded 'Turning Violent' team at Leiden University. Combining comparative ethnographic fieldwork, conversation analysis, and video data, her research focuses on the moral dimensions of social life - and, in her current project, on the moral scaffolding of violent encounters. As a graduate of the EHESS and the University of Cambridge, she has previously held teaching positions at the Université de Poitiers, Université Paris-Est Créteil, and the École Normale Supérieure.

More information about Noemi Casati

Noemi Casati is a sociologist and Postdoctoral Researcher with the ERC-funded "Turning Violent" team, led by Don Weenink, at Leiden University's Institute for Security and Global Affairs.

Within the Turning Violent project, she is developing research on the moral dimensions of violent encounters. Rather than treating violence as a suspension of the moral order, her work approaches it as a form of conduct that remains deeply organised around moral concerns, looking at how the various participants - antagonists, bystanders, online commentators - make violence accountable from a moral standpoint.

Before joining Leiden, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Laboratoire d’Excellence Tepsis (2024-2025). Her project investigated how ordinary actors navigate, resist, and sometimes unwittingly reproduce racial categorisations in everyday talk. This built on her doctoral dissertation, defended at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), which was based on a comparative ethnography of two far-right-governed towns in France and Italy and examined why actors in the two countries relate so differently to speech norms concerning ethno-racial categories in everyday conversations.

Her work sits at the intersection of the sociology of knowledge and morality, the sociology of race and racism, and the study of language and interaction. She has participated in several collective research endeavours, including one ANR-funded project on political processes in France during the Covid-19 epidemic and an ISFR-funded project on refugees’ socio-legal experiences in Europe.

Her research can be read in international peer-reviewed journals such as Ethnography, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Qualitative Sociology, or the Annual Review of Law and Social Sciences. She is also currently preparing a book manuscript based on her doctoral research.