Maria Molinari graduated in Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology from the University of Bologna. She wrote her degree thesis on Indigenous Civilisation in America, focusing on the female figure in Huari Province, an area within the Black Cordillera of the Peruvian region, Ancash.
She is specialised in the field of Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology.
In 2005, after a post-graduate degree in decentralised co-operation and gaining experience in India and Uganda, she began working on three different social services related immigration projects in Parma, addressing sensitive issues such as the inclusion of Roma, female human trafficking victims and multi-ethnic adolescents. To compliment these employment experiences, she decided to obtain a first level Master's at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia under the specific theme of integration in multicultural societies. That same year, in 2014, she won a scholarship from the University of Parma for carrying out research at a large logistics and transport company in the province, addressing issues of multi-ethnic personnel management.
In the most recent phase of her professional life, Maria has left the city to return to where she grew up in the Parma Apennines.
Since 2010, she has concentrated on asylum issues, coordinating SPRAR projects for mountain municipalities in the province of Parma and raising local political awareness of the specifics and importance of reception in decentralised mountain contexts.
A tireless supporter of Apennine area development and passionate about trekking, in 2016 she became an an environmental hiking guide registered with AIGAE (www.aigae.org). Since then, she has become one of nine local guides from the Trekking Taro Ceno group (www.trekkingtaroceno.it) whose aims include developing knowledge and appreciation of the Parma and Liguria-Lunigiana Apennines’ environmental and cultural characteristics. She therefore passionately pursues two professional paths: organising the reception of asylum seekers and refugees in mountain contexts and accompanying tourists interested in enriching their cultural appreciation of mountain environments. She’s convinced that change is the only way to develop the region.
In 2016, together with her partner and some friends, she founded the Piccolo Festival dell'Antropologia della Montagna (Small Mountain Anthropology Festival), in which anthropologists, writers, geographers and mountain enthusiasts divulge their knowledge of a disappearing world that’s also in the process of becoming!
Links
http://www.trekkingtaroceno.it/maria-molinari/
https://missmolli.wordpress.com/
http://www.aigae.org/cerca-guide/
https://www.facebook.com/PiccoloFestivaldiAntropologiadellaMontagna/?fref=ts
