Michela Giovannini is assistant professor at the Competence Centre for the Management of Cooperatives at the Free University of Bolzano/Bozen. She holds a PhD in Local Development and Global Dynamics at the University of Trento. She had several postdoc and research positions in different institutions, such as the Department of Sociology and Social Research (University of Trento), the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra (Portugal), where she held a Marie Curie Individual Fellowship, the Centre for Social Economy at the University of Liege (Belgium) and Euricse (Italy). She spent visiting periods at the International Centre on Social Economy and Cooperatives of the University of Santiago de Chile, the Faculty of Accounting and Management of the University of Querétaro (Mexico) and the Centre for Cooperative and Community Based Economy at the University of Victoria (Canada). Her main research interests include cooperatives and local development, social and solidarity economy organizations and their contribution to economic democracy in different social and geographical contexts, collective action and the interplays between social movements and the solidarity economy, indigenous grassroots organizations in Latin America.