Team

• Giovanna Astolfo is Associate Professor, architect by training, and urban researcher with over ten years of experience working at the intersection of housing justice and displacement urbanism at the DPU. Since 2015, her research interest revolves around three core themes. Domopolitics, or how refugees and migrants are often trapped within humanitarian systems that function more as systems of control, turning homes into prisons. Necropolitical infrastructures, or how the arrival, reception, and overall management of refugees in Europe is built on the creation of a racialized subject and their subsequent erosion. Homing and domesticity, or how people create and sustain a sense of home in often hostile environments, whatever „home“ might mean to people. In the UK, I am particularly focused on the hostility migrants face and how domesticity persists in such conditions.
• Estella Carpi is a social anthropologist, presently Associate Professor of Humanitarian Studies at University College London. She is the author of The Politics of Crisis-Making. Forced Displacement and Cultures of Assistance in Lebanon (Indiana University Press, 2023). Estella’s research mostly looked at humanitarianism, forced migrations and identity politics in Lebanon and Türkiye.
• Stefano Mastromarino is an architect, refugee support worker and PhD candidate at The Bartlett DPU, UCL, funded by an ESRC UBEL studentship. A former research assistant at the Ipraus Lab in Paris for the development of the platform “Architecture et précarités”, he worked and studied Architecture at Politecnico di Torino, ENSA Paris-Belleville and TU Dortmund. Besides academia, he engaged in different forms of migrant support and activism in France, Italy and the UK and worked as a UASC Support Worker for a non-profit organisation providing housing and aid services to young people seeking asylum in the UK. 
• Harriet Allsopp has a disciplinary background in IR, Politics and Middle Eastern Studies. Her expertise and experience extend from political-economy to micro level social organisation, with particular focus on global and local integration and exclusion mechanisms, migration and displacement and on the intersectionality of these with racial discrimination and structural inequalities. Her independent research has focused on disputed/border territories and spaces, the organisation of groups with restricted rights and their underlying political and socio-economic relations and geo-political contexts, employing mixed and adaptive methodologies to negotiate challenging research environments. Her research on Syria examined political and social organisation and strategies of Kurdish populations, including post-2011 responses and adaptations to conflict and autonomous governance. At the UCL she has worked on the RELIEF Project and, within the DPU, on HOUSE-IN; EPIC; Curing the Limbo.

Research Assistants

• Negin Darvishahmadi has seven years of professional experience working with refugees and immigrants in Türkiye. She works as an independent Persian- and Turkish-speaking field researcher for several EU-funded projects and beyond. She completed her masters degree with a focus on irregular migration and Afghan women in Istanbul.
• Ouaees Hommous is an Architect and Urbanist, currently pursuing an MA in Sociology at Ibn Haldun University. He aims to leverage his expertise to foster positive social, political, and spatial change through activism and policy-making initiatives, with a current focus on migrant communities and host societies.
• Sepehr Roshanshomal, PhD candidate at Halic University, Istanbul. He received his MSc in Architecture from Bahçeşehir University. He primarily works on natural structures and the human-nature relation in architecture and the built environment.