Alessandra Minissale

Short presentation

Alessandra Minissale holds a double doctorate in Sociology (Uppsala University) and Legal Studies (Bologna University).

She is the PI of the project Justice Outside the Court. An Ethnography of Emotions in Commercial Mediation, funded by the Swedish Research Council, which focuses on emotions' role in commercial disputes in Italy and England.

She coordinates the research group EMOJI.

Previously, her research focused on emotions, narrative and decision-making in court, as part of the internationa

Keywords

• mediation
• interaction
• justice
• emotions
• legal reasoning
• narraitve
• commercial conflict
• alternative dispute resolution

Biography

Prior to her double PhD in Sociology and Legal Studies, Alessandra graduated in Law (2016), cum laude, and worked at Bologna University as Teaching Assistant in Civil Procedural Law. She also worked as a trainee lawyer and judge's assistant in Italy.

In 2027, she will be a Visiting Fellow at the School of Communication, Society, and Culture, Macquarie University, Sydney.

In 2026, she was an Acedemic Visitor at the Centre of Socio-Legal Studies, University of Oxford, where she was a recognised PhD student (spring 2023). In 2024, she was a visiting researcher at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies of Law (CIS) - University of Copenhagen.

Alessandra is an active member of the Law and Society Association and she is the Vice-Coordinator of the Research Network 11-Sociology of emotions, of the European Sociological Association (2026-2028).

In 2023, she was granted the SYLFF - The Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund - (SEK 350.000) for her Postdoc project The Emotional Dimension of Commercial Conflicts: An Ethnographic Study of Commercial Mediation in Italy and England. For the same project, Alessandra also won SEK 3.450.000,00 from Vetenskapsrådet (Swedish Research Council). Alessandra will conduct her research in Italy, at the Institute of Legal Informatics and Judicial Systems-National Research Council of Italy (Bologna), and in England, at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies (Oxford University). More information about the project Justice Outside the Court.

She is an affiliated researcher of the Institute of Legal Informatics and Judicial Systems and the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Victimology and Security both in Bologna, Italy.

In 2022, Alessandra’s article titled “Scrutinizing Gut Feelings: Emotional Reflexive Practices in Italian Courts” unanimously received the Best Paper Award at the 2022 European Sociological Association Midterm Conference in Hamburg.

Alessandra also has teaching experience in the Sociology programme, where she teaches “Qualitative Methods in the Social Science”; in the Social Work programme, where she teaches “Legal Perspectives on Social Interaction”; and in the Civil Procedural Law course at Bologna University, where she gives lectures on “The role of emotions in legal practice”. She also supervises master students at the Department of Informatics and Media - Uppsala University.

Publications currently under work:

Minissale, A., Emotions in Commercial Mediation: Navigating Conflicts and Feelings. Book under contract with Routledge, Studies in the Sociology of Emotions book series.

Research

Member of:

Emotion, Justice and Interaction - Uppsala University http://soc.uu.se/forskning/forskargrupper/emoji/

Law and Society Association

European Sociological Associaton

Swedish Sociological Association

Judicial Administration Research (member of the working group on communication)