Research

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.