Team

Dr. Mastoureh Fathi
Senior Lecturer in Sociology, University College Cork
mastoureh.fathi@ucc.ie

Mastoureh Fathi is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the Department of Sociology and Criminology, University College Cork, Ireland. She has published on topics of home and migration, class, gender, intersectionality and identity. She is currently the PI on project funded by Research Ireland (Migrants’ Digital Spaces: MIGDIS). She was a Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellow at Institute for Social Science Research in 21st Century; PI on a British Academy funded project Home, Pedagogy and Belonging and PI on an Irish Research Council funded project Elderly (non)migrants’ narratives of home: A comparative study of place-making in Ireland and Germany. Her latest book is called Migration and Home: An IMISCOE Short Reader (2024 Springer, open access), co-authored with Caitriona Ní Laoire. She is currently serving as the co-editor in chief of Irish Journal of Sociology.

Dr. Pooya Ghoddousi
PostDoc, University College Cork

Dr Pooya Ghoddousi is a Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Criminology. Before his academic career, Pooya trained and worked as an architect in Tehran before moving to Dubai. His disillusion with the unsustainable urban development in Dubai led him to study nomadism as an alternative to existing human settlements. He joined an environmental NGO in Iran to live and work with pastoral nomads, and then carried the lessons into his participatory research and activism in London. His master’s and PhD theses (at LSE and UCL respectively) explored the nomadic tendencies in the transnational assemblages of identity, belonging and collective action among Iranians in London. He has since held is an LSE Fellowship in the Department of Geography and Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science, an ESRC Post-doctoral Research Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London, and a Teaching Fellowship at University College London. His research, activism and writing are inspired by the concepts of assemblages and nomadism by Deleuze, Guattari and Ibn Khaldun.

Dr. Sernaz Arslan
PostDoc, Koç University

Dr Sernaz Arslan is a Post-doctoral Researcher at the Migration Research Center at Koç University (MiReKoc) in Istanbul.
Her work examines the intersection of migration and urban studies, with a specific focus on urban citizenship, the “right to the city” for vulnerable groups, urban belonging and feminist geography.
She completed her PhD in Political Science in 2023, where her doctoral research analyzed how rural-to-urban migrants navigate urban appropriation and citizenship practices in Istanbul. She has contributed to several national and international research projects. Her methodological approach emphasizes multidisciplinary frameworks and qualitative inquiry. In addition to her research, Arslan also teaches undergraduate courses at Koç University’s College of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Martino Zibetti
PhD Candidate, University College Cork

Martino Zibetti is an activist and doctoral researcher at University College Cork. Martino is conducting his PhD within MIGDIS, researching the digital home-making practices of food delivery migrant workers in Ireland, and exploring how gig labour, digitalization, and racial banishments intersect in the algorithmic city. Martino’s research has appeared on Antipode, Current Issues in Migration Research, and VOLUME 65.

Carrie Ryan
PhD Candidate, University College Cork

Carrie Ryan’s research focuses on digital intimacy, gendered surveillance, and coercive control within the Irish legal system. Her work examines how smart technologies shape domestic abuse and how legal frameworks respond from a feminist perspective.