Broadly, Professor Scaramelli's research centers on mutual constitutions of ecologies, scientific expertise, and infrastructures as conduits for people’s moral claims about human and non-human livelihoods. She is currently completing a research project that examines the dynamic multivalence of wetlands. In Turkey, as in many other places, the wetland became an important site of everyday contestations over new and foreclosed possibilities in a time of uncertain politics and in precarious and rapidly changing environments. Wetland conservation has often reinvented and repurposed older tools of swamp reclamation to legitimize technocratic environmental management.

At the same time, various social groups have also found in the wetland a fertile yet uncertain, murky, and mobile ground for cultivating new aspirations of democracy, multi-species livelihoods, and more just ecologies. Professor Scaramelli is also embarking on a new ethnographic research project on ecological precarity and mobility. In this new project, she will examine the cultural and political significance of “heirloom” seeds in the Mediterranean to explore changing experiences of health, precarity, labor, nation, race, and belonging.