I am an Italian urban researcher currently working in Ireland at the Department of Geography, Maynooth University as an Irish Research Council (IRC) Postdoctoral grant holder on a ethnographic/community-based project on post-crash gentrification in Dublin from the perspective of existing working class residents (supervisor: Dr. Sinead Kelly). I am also research partner member in the University of Amsterdam-ERC project HOUWEL on housing, welfare state and family wealth.

I have been developing my academic expertise mainly in the field of gentrification, by researching class, race/ethnicity, gender and sexual inequalities across different countries. In the last 10 years, I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the contested Milan Chinatown, with Afghani refugees in the former Italcementi factory in Trento, in the urban frontier of the super-gentrified neighborhood of Brooklyn’s Park Slope in NYC, and, more recently, collaborating with a working class community for the right to housing in inner Dublin.

In addition to several publications in journals and edited volumes, I have produced different documentaries based on my ethnographic work: “A-way from Paolo Sarpi”, the Ethnographic Documentary from the Milan’s Chinatown has been screened during the American Sociological Association Conference of Denver, USA, in 2012.

Video recording on the High Line in Manhattan (c) 2012