Dr Morena Tartari

Morena Tartari joined Northumbria University in 2024, where she is Associate Professor in Criminology and Sociology.

Morena holds a doctoral degree in Sociology from the University of Padua (Italy) where she started conducting research on moral panics and social problems construction concerning children and families.

Before moving to Northumbria University, Morena was awarded several research grants, including some prestigious fellowships such as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship (hosted by the University of Antwerp, Belgium), and a STARS-Starting Grant (hosted by the University of Padua, Italy, and funded by the programme Supporting Talent in Research). Morena was also a visiting fellow at the University of Edinburgh, School of Social and Political Science, and at the University of Alberta, Canada, at the International Institute for Qualitative Methodology.

Morena is Secretary/Treasurer (2025-2028) of the ISA-International Sociological Association WG06 (Institutional Ethnography). 

Morena is also one of the founding members of the European Network of Institutional Ethnography (IE), a sociological approach developed by the Canadian scholar Dorothy Smith. Morena has been also one of the co-organizers of the Research Stream on IE at the European Sociological Association (ESA) 2022, 2024 and 2026 Conferences.

Moreover, Morena is the Chair (2026-2028) for the Social Problems Theory Division and was the Chair (2023-2025) of the Teaching Social Problems Division for the Society for the Study of Social Problems, an US-based academic organization that promotes and protects sociological research and teaching on significant problems of social life.

Over the years, Morena has published extensively on moral panics in the contemporary world, family issues and domestic violence, sharenting and social harms. In the past five years, she has also been awarded several research grants related to her work on nonreligion in the everyday life.

Before joining the academia, Morena worked for several years as a practitioner in the public health system, criminal justice system and in the private sector. She has experience as organizer of and instructor in multi-agency training on domestic violence, child abuse and drug/alcohol addiction involving practitioners and officers from different institutions including law enforcement agencies.