Tommaso Vitale

Tommaso Vitale is an Italian sociologist and academic who is a full professor of sociology at Sciences Po in Paris. He serves as dean of the Sciences Po Urban School. He studied political science and sociology at the University of Milan, earned a master's degree in political science in 1999 and a doctorate in sociology in 2003.

Career Vitale's first academic post was at the University of Milan Bicocca. In 2010, he joined Sciences Po as an associate professor of sociology at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics and became scientific director of the master's program Governing the Large Metropolis. He also contributes to analysis for the CNCDH annual reporting on racism, antisemitism, and xenophobia, including analysis of barometer data. A strand of his scholarship concerns migration, racialisation, and the effects of public action on marginalised groups in European cities.

Writing Vitale's publications include edited collections and co authored monographs on civic participation, mobilisation, and urban governance. His edited volume In nome di chi? Partecipazione e rappresentanza nelle mobilitazioni locali addresses tensions between participation and political representation through multiple urban case studies. In June 2024, Fondazione Giangiacomo Feltrinelli published City Divide: Fighting Urban Inequalities, edited by Vitale, and presented it as a comparative examination of mechanisms that generate and perpetuate disparities in urban contexts.

His last book, La prospettiva civica (2024), presents the main findings of a large-scale comparative study on civic activism and associational life in four major Italian cities—Milan, Florence, Rome, and Naples—addressing a core question of urban sociology: how do activists, through their everyday engagement within associations, contribute to the production, reproduction, and transformation of urban inequalities? Across cities, associative engagement emerges as a key site for practices of decommodification, where access to services, sociality, and recognition is partially removed from market logics. Proximity and relational density within neighborhoods play a crucial role in enabling inclusive practices and experimental forms of democracy, even in contexts of structural inequality and institutional fragmentation.

He has edited many issues in journals such as Partecipazione e conflitto, Géocarrefour, Sociologia del lavoro, and Quaderni. His peer-reviewed articles appear in journals including the Journal of Urban Affairs, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Habitat International, Transnational Corporations Review, Social Movements Studies, Sociologie, and Journal of European Public Policy. Sciences Po's announcement of his deanship also associates him with the founding of the Italian sociology journal Partecipazione e Conflitto.