In my PhD, I focused on Iranian cinema and employed Critical Visual Discourse Analysis in dialogue with ethnographic approaches to everyday life.  Through this work, I examined how cinematic forms shape everyday experiences of boredom, dissatisfaction, traumatisation, victimhood, and uncertainty, and how these experiences contribute to the affective production of political subjectivities.

Alongside this work, I have developed the concept of public sociological film, which emerges from public sociology and documentary filmmaking. This research is presented in my book Visualising Social Narratives: Sociology Meets Documentary, under contract with Palgrave Macmillan. In the book, I examine how sociology can shape filmmaking and how documentary film can function as a sociological practice in its own right, rather than simply an object of analysis or a tool for dissemination. The concept of public sociological film treats filmmaking as a mode of sociological inquiry that communicates research through cinematic form across different genres and works with publics and communities in the co-production of knowledge, drawing on participatory and arts-based research traditions.

More recently, I’ve been asking how migration studies might look different if we drew on a wider range of epistemologies and moved beyond dominant Western perspectives. Coming from everyday life studies and also having personal experience of migration, I focus on decolonial approaches and on creating space for different ways of knowing.

If I were to choose keywords for my research, they would include public sociology, film, migration, everyday life studies, and decoloniality. But more than words, I see them as threads that weave my work together and hopefully open up a conversation about how we see, feel, and imagine society.