My research focuses on MENA migrant lives. It looks at how migration is lived in everyday situations and how it is shaped through film and digital media. I work directly with migrants through field-based research, and I also examine how their lives are framed in film and online spaces. Lived experience and representation are treated as closely connected, with attention to how migration takes form across different contexts rather than separating what is lived from how it is shown.

In my PhD, I examined urban everyday life in Iran, focusing on how experiences such as uncertainty, boredom, victimisation and dissatisfaction take shape within specific social and political conditions, including those that create the desire or pressure to leave. I approached this through Iranian cinema, using critical visual discourse analysis alongside ethnographic attention to everyday life. This showed how cinematic form does not simply depict these conditions but shapes how they are understood, with questions of mobility already present in everyday life.

My current work moves across film and digital media, combining multimodal analysis with interviews and engagement with online spaces. It focuses on how meanings of migration are produced and circulated, moving between people’s lived situations and the forms through which these lives become visible.

A central part of this work is the development of public sociological film, where filmmaking becomes part of the research process. In my book Writing with the Camera (under contract with Palgrave Macmillan), I show how documentary practice can generate sociological knowledge through montage and mise-en-scène, and how working with participants in filmmaking shapes how that knowledge is produced. This work starts from the idea that lived experience and its representation are closely connected. By combining fieldwork and filmmaking, it develops ways of studying everyday life that remain grounded while also reaching wider audiences.