Meet the researchers and academics involved in the Migrant Futures Institute.
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Director
Professor Bridget Anderson
Professor Bridget Anderson is Director of the Migrant Futures Institute. She was a Philippines solidarity activist before moving to migrant organizing and later into academic research. She has spent more than three decades researching human movement, inequalities and justice, working closely with migrant organisations, policymakers and civil society. Professor Anderson was previously Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol at the University of Bristol. Bridget has led several major international research collaborations and worked with people inside and outside the academy. Her books include 'Doing the Dirty Work? The global politics of domestic labour', and 'Us and Them? The dangerous politics of immigration controls'.
Bridget is an internationally recognised critical and imaginative scholar whose work challenges conventional approaches to migration. Her work is driven by a belief that scholarship should not only deepen understanding but also contribute to the creation of a more just world.
Bridget uses 鈥榤igration鈥� as a lens for understanding the histories, presents, and futures of a world in which nation-states and citizenship have become naturalised and largely taken for granted. Rather than beginning from an assumed distinction between migrant and citizen, she argues for the importance of recognising when 鈥榤igrant鈥� is a cypher for race, class and gender.
Through this perspective, Bridget seeks to develop new forms of political thinking that centre migration without reifying it, connecting migration to human movement, and human movement to the wider mobilities of goods, ideas, species, data, and capital that shape contemporary life. Her recent work is characterised by a commitment to radical interdisciplinarity, bringing diverse epistemologies into conversation, including artistic practices and community-based knowledges, to generate new forms of analysis and action.
Co-Directors
Dr Sultan Doughan
Sultan Doughan is a political anthropologist specialising in the secular governance of religious difference within liberal democracies in Europe. Her current book project, tentatively titled 'Converting Citizens: German Secularism and the Politics of Holocaust Memory,' is based on fieldwork in Germany and approaches citizenship as a practice and technology of secular conversion.
Sultan's main concern is how debates on memory, race, migration and religious difference after the genocide of European Jewry generate, shape, and minoritise Middle Eastern diasporas as Muslim. She explores how the memory of violence inscribes state-funded educational institutions in Germany to become arbiters of injury, hierarchising suffering and belonging with grave consequences for contemporary migrant communities and their access to legal and political rights.
Sultan also focuses on migrant archival practices, memorial and museum spaces, and efforts for repair amidst ongoing state and police violence and the deferral of justice.
Mirca Madianou is Professor in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies. She has a long-standing interest in migration and humanitarian emergencies and their intersection with digital technologies and infrastructures.
In particular, her work investigates the role played by digital technologies in shaping processes of inequality and social change in transnational and postcolonial contexts.
Mirca Madianou is Professor in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies. She has a long-standing interest in migration and humanitarian emergencies and their intersection with digital technologies and infrastructures.
In particular, her work investigates the role played by digital technologies in shaping processes of inequality and social change in transnational and postcolonial contexts.
Her recent book , which won the 2026 Outstanding Book Award of the International Communication Association, examines the role of digital infrastructures and artificial intelligence (AI) in humanitarian operations, including the response to refugee flows. Based on ten years of research, the book puts forward a new concept, 鈥榯echnocolonalism鈥�, to analyse how the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures, state power and market forces reinvigorates and reworks colonial power relations which have been part of humanitarianism and AI.
Mirca is currently PI on the British Academy project 鈥楻eimagining Digital Identity practices among Karen refugees in Thailand鈥� which traces the consequences of biometric technologies in a refugee camp in Western Thailand. The project also employs participatory art methods to imagine alternative futures. The artwork produced by Karen co-researchers has been the focus of four international exhibitions including at the Migrant Futures Institute / Goldsmiths.
In earlier work, Madianou explored the phenomenon of transnational families through an ethnography of Filipino migrants in the UK and their children who remain in the Philippines. Her book (co-authored with Daniel Miller) explores the contours of distant parenting 鈥� and the implications of technological mediation for 鈥榗are at a distance鈥� and for the phenomenon of migration more broadly.
Kit Hung is a Hong Kong filmmaker and a PhD graduate from the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, 51黑料网. He founded the Secure Storyteller Network (SSN), supporting vulnerable, cross-border filmmakers and small production teams with safer workflows, digital security skills, and wellbeing-aware practice.
His work bridges film production, research, and training, with experience delivering multilingual workshops in Europe and Asia and teaching in community settings, including refugee contexts. He designs practical toolkits that combine consent ethics, data minimisation, and risk assessment for real productions, especially where surveillance and political pressure shape decisions.
SSN has been supported through Berlinale Talents Mastercard Enablement Programme, recognised with Deutsche Bank Awards for Creative Entrepreneurs, and sponsored by Yubico.
Dr Daria Lynch
Daria is a historian of cities, migration, and memory whose work asks a vital question: who gets to shape the stories our urban spaces tell? She holds a doctorate in History & Heritage Studies and works at the intersection of research, policy, and public practice, advancing new approaches to newcomer inclusion, multicultural heritage, and urban belonging. Her scholarship combines rigorous archival research and oral history with critical heritage theory, contributing to debates in urban studies, migration history, and the civic role of cultural institutions.
Over the past decade, Daria has worked across academic, cultural, and policy sectors, partnering with museums, NGOs, and local authorities to co-create projects that amplify migrant and refugee voices. Her practice is grounded in community-based, participatory methods - from collaborative storytelling and workshops to collection development and public programming - ensuring that heritage spaces become more inclusive, representative, and accountable.
She has collaborated with communities across the UK, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Turkey, Azerbaijan, India, and the United States, building transnational networks of research and engagement. The child of migrants from the Soviet Union to the United States, and a migrant to
Britain herself, Daria brings both scholarly expertise and lived experience to her work. She is committed to ethical, community-led heritage practice and to reshaping cultural institutions as sites of dialogue, equity, and social justice. For Daria, scholarship is not only about interpreting the past鈥攊t is a tool for transforming the present and building more inclusive urban futures.
Dr Myriam Dalal
Myriam is a multilingual Arab researcher and writer. Her work draws on participatory practices, public history, and artistic research to document absence and silence in contexts of political violence.
Following her Ph.D. in Arts and Sciences of Art from Sorbonne University in France, Dalal concluded a postdoctoral fellowship in public history, co-production, and participatory practices at the University of Luxembourg, where she worked with Portuguese, Cape Verdean, Syrian, and Palestinian communities to revisit Luxembourg鈥檚 history of migration.
She later served as a public history and outreach consultant for the public history axis at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, where she managed multiple projects across the Global South, namely in Egypt, Kenya, Martinique, Qatar, and Lebanon. As an academic, Dalal taught photography and visual culture for more than four years at a University level in Lebanon, and her writings have appeared in journals, newspapers and platforms across the globe. Her monograph "The Image and the Regime" (Arabic, forthcoming) received the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture's Creative and Critical Writing grant.
PhD Fellows
Sally Haloubi
Sally Haloubi is a PhD Fellow in Visual Anthropology. Her PhD project collaborates with forcibly displaced filmmakers to co-develop a visual autoethnographic approach to migration experiences. She is an award-winning filmmaker, researcher, and artist. Sally鈥檚 research engages with participatory filmmaking and visual-sensory anthropology. Her work explores themes of memory, identity, and migration. She holds an MA in Cinema and TV from Anadolu University, where her thesis examined and traced Syrian cinema鈥檚 hundred-year history. She also holds a BA in Radio, TV and Cinema from 脟ukurova University.
Sally鈥檚 PhD project, 鈥楥onscious Data鈥�, is interested in working with forcibly displaced filmmakers, who, as migrants, frequently struggle to reflect on internal experiences due to trauma, loss, or diminished self-recognition. The project explores the possible outcomes of applying autoethnography to migration themes, how autoethnography might be methodologically reshaped to better fit personal experiences within these themes, and the extent to which this emergent approach can be situated within and remain relevant to broader social contexts. It employs visual autoethnography as a methodological entry point and aims to co-develop, among forcibly displaced filmmakers, a visual-sensory autoethnographic framework tailored to migration experiences. The research aims to produce Conscious Data, a term introduced to describe knowledge that emerges directly from subjects鈥� self-awareness and reflexive engagement with their creative outputs, cultivated through the co-developed autoethnographic framework. Conscious Data is particularly necessary for migrants, whose subjectivities are ongoing processes shaped by displacement and memory loss, as it proposes different ways of working with individuals in motion, for whom externally imposed or fixed research protocols may be insufficient.
Will Pham
Will Pham is an interdisciplinary artist exploring Vietnamese refugee resettlement, transgenerational memory and diasporic identity. Working across moving image, painting, text and socially engaged art, his practice reuses and transforms family and community archives to explore alternative narratives of survival, belonging and cultural inheritance. His work creates spaces for communities to reclaim, reimagine and share the stories that shape their lives. Will is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in Fine Art, funded by the Migrant Futures Doctoral Studentship. He is also Community Producer (East and Southeast Asian Programme) at the Museum of the Home in 51黑料网.
Will's PhD project, 'Ngon Qu谩: Transgenerational Memory and Socially Engaged Art in the British-Vietnamese Diaspora' investigates how socially engaged art can mediate transgenerational memory within Vietnamese diasporic communities in the UK.
The practice-based research explores how food, storytelling and collaborative art-making can become spaces for intergenerational exchange, cultural negotiation and narrative practice. Building on Will鈥檚 project Ngon Qu谩 (originally commissioned by Deptford X), the research develops the 鈥淩ecipes of Life鈥� methodology by Natale Rudland-Wood, in which participants use food and cooking as prompts to explore memories, relationships, histories and journeys. Through this process, everyday recipes become ways of articulating experiences of migration, displacement, belonging and cultural inheritance.
The research brings together three generations and migratory positions within the British-Vietnamese community: first-generation Vietnamese refugees who arrived in the UK in the 1980s and their children, contemporary Vietnamese migrants experiencing legal precarity, and third-generation British-Vietnamese young people negotiating inherited memory and cultural identity.
Through workshops, moving image, painting, drawing and reflective writing, the project asks how creative practice can translate memory across generations while supporting resilience, cultural continuity and new forms of belonging. It considers how communities might move beyond inherited narratives of survival towards practices of cultural renewal and collective flourishing through creative practice. Using co-creation and participation, communities are invited to create their own collective narrative methodologies and metaphors that resonate with them which may reach beyond food, connecting with place, ancestors and futures.
MFI Staff
Anya Edmond-Pettitt
Anya Edmond-Pettitt is Operations Manager at MFI, working across organisational strategy and programme development. She brings experience in research, organising and institutional management, developed through professional experience and collaborations with academic, cultural and community organisations. Her work at MFI connects the practical infrastructures that sustain research and collective action with broader questions of migration, race and belonging. Anya is particularly interested in archives, public memory and the histories of migrant and anti-racist movements, including how these histories shape contemporary understandings of Britain and its futures.
Anya leads the development and coordination of the organisational systems, governance structures and partnerships that support MFI鈥檚 research and public engagement. Her work spans strategic and operational planning, programme development, institutional relationships and the coordination of research initiatives, fellowships, grants and public events. She works to translate MFI鈥檚 ambitions into sustainable programmes and collaborative ways of working, bringing together academic research, creative practice and engagement with migrant communities and civil society.
Alongside her operational work, Anya鈥檚 interests centre on migration, borders, race, archives and public memory. She has combined organisational leadership with migration research, anti-racist organising and archival projects. Her work to date has examined how migrant and anti-racist histories are preserved, whose experiences shape national memory, and how archives can connect past movements with contemporary struggles and future political possibilities. Anya is interested in how historical and contemporary structures of racism, colonialism and border control shape migration policy, political debate and lived experience. Specifically, she is interested in the relationship between migrant and anti-racist movements, the preservation of their histories, and the ways these histories inform contemporary struggles for justice and alternative political futures. These interests inform her wider commitment to building and contributing to research infrastructures that support collective knowledge-making, public engagement and social change.
Dr Helen Brewer
Dr Helen Brewer is a researcher and organiser. She completed her PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of 51黑料网, and has taught as an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art. Following a Postdoctoral Research Associate position at Goldsmiths where she supported the Migrant Futures Institute鈥檚 early development, she now works as its Development Manager.
With a background in architecture and the built environment, Helen's research investigates the spatial and structural complexities of inner border geographies, with a particular focus on migration and displacement. Her work seeks to articulate a renewed mode of care: one grounded in abolitionist city-making and practised through a relational ethics that challenges prevailing systems of exclusion.
Her doctoral research examined the infrastructures of the UK's Hostile/Compliant Environment: the institutions, resources and relationships through which support for displaced people is organised, conditioned or withheld. This inquiry has shaped her move into development work at the Migrant Futures Institute, where the work of fundraising extends to questions of resource justice and instituting abolition. How might institutions be built, funded and governed in ways that redistribute resources and refuse to reproduce the exclusions they seek to address? Helen approaches the practical work of funding as integral to that question.
Dr Enaiê Mairê Holter
Dr Enai锚 Mair锚 Holter (n茅e Azambuja) is Impact & Engagement Officer at MFI, where she oversees impact strategies, evaluation and learning. Enai锚 develops strategies to demonstrate and amplify the social impact of MFI鈥檚 research. She supports researchers, fellows, and grant recipients in developing research impact, leads evaluation and reporting, and helps build partnerships to amplify migrant voices, experiences, and perspectives across academic, cultural, policy and civic contexts.
Enai锚鈥檚 research brings together English Literature and Environmental Humanities, with expertise in ecocriticism, ecopoetics, poetry, philosophy, and religious studies. She completed her PhD in English Literature in 2021 and has held postdoctoral research positions at the School of Advanced 51黑料网, University of 51黑料网, and Lancaster University, where she contributed to the British Academy鈥檚 Knowledge Frontiers-funded 鈥榃etland Times鈥� project. Her book, 鈥楾he Zen of Ecopoetics鈥�, published by Routledge in 2023, explores the influence of Zen Buddhism and Taoism on modernist poetry in the context of ecological concerns.
Enai锚鈥檚 broader research interests include migration, environmental change, cultural memory, eco-diasporas, climate change and displacement. She is also writing a book tracing her great-grandparents鈥� migration from Austria to Brazil during the interwar period, exploring migration, transgenerational trauma and mental health through family history. This project connects personal histories with wider questions of belonging, identity, memory and wellbeing across generations.
Dr Shelley Angelie Saggar
Dr Shelley Angelie Saggar is Communications & Events Coordinator at the Migrant Futures Institute, where she works to promote MFI's research and public programme. Her background in literary studies and museum practice informs her approach to developing public engagement activities at MFI that centre research-informed creative practice.
Shelley's research is informed by her extensive professional experience connecting communities with major UK museum collections. These include Wellcome Collection, the Science Museum, and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She completed her PhD at the University of Kent's Centre for Indigenous and Settler Colonial Studies in 2024, funded by the AHRC and was Postdoctoral Researcher on the AHRC-funded 'Sharing Lands: Reconciliation, Recognition, and Reciprocity' project at 51黑料网, from 2025-26. Shelley's current research focuses on how collected items in museums and archives can be understood as ancestral diasporas, and her work examines how this is represented in contemporary Indigenous literatures. She brings her interest in Indigenous mobilities to her work at MFI.