Lidia Katia C. Manzo has been recently awarded with the Marie Sklodowska Curie European Individual Fellowship (2020-2022) to develop the project CITY-OF-CARE at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the Milan University to investigate the financialization of social housing in European cities across different socio-political context and welfare regimes. She has recently completed the research project “Love at the time of Globalization: affective relationships as practices of everyday multiculturalism” under the “Migration and Migrants” Alsos Foundation Fellowship (2018-2020) at the same Department. Prior to this, she has been awarded with an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral grant to work at the Department of Geography of Maynooth University on a ethnographic, community-based project on post-crash gentrification in Dublin (2015-2018). In 2013-2016 she has been partner member and lead-researcher in Milan for the ERC funded HOUWEL (Housing, Welfare State Transformations, and Family Wealth) project at the University of Amsterdam, being affiliated also with the Politecnico di Milano University as a Contract Professor for the MSc in Urban Planning and Policy Design, course on Contemporary City: social change and policies. She completed her Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Research in 2014 at the University of Trento. Her doctoral dissertation was focused on institutions, housing and lifestyles in the Super-gentrification process of Brooklyn’s Park Slope, whereby she has held a twenty-month long affiliation as Visiting Doctoral Researcher at The City University of New York.

Parallel to academia, her work conducted as an urban social policy expert for the City of Milan (to develop second generation migrants’ pathways of social inclusion), and for Lombardy Region (to design a territorial policy agenda for young people in a time of crisis), provided her with an opportunity to develop and evaluate social policies that increase access to economic opportunity for women and minority populations, as well as those that manage economic and social risks. When in December 2015 she was recommended by the Mayor of Milan to edit a book based on such experience she finally embraced with considerable enthusiasm the challenge to promote effective communication of urban policies and programs seeking ground-breaking initiatives for the development of good-governance models.

The lines of research around which her current scientific production is articulated are oriented in three main directions. The first area of interest lies in the debate on shifting social-spatial urban inequalities, paying specific attention to the intersecting processes of gentrification and financialization. The second line of research explores the construction of difference in everyday life experiences, with a focus on urban multicultural relationships, second generation migrants, globalization processes and new media technologies. The third research area investigates how the theoretical and methodological union of ethnography, visual methods and participatory approaches can contribute to praxis for more democratic urbanization and public outreach with non-academic actors.

The originality and excellence of her research has been recognized through winning several research grants and contracts from prestigious institutions: the Italian Ministry of Education, the University of Amsterdam, the City University of New York, and Maynooth University, among others. She has also published 4 monographs and edited books, 20 articles in high-ranking/international peer reviewed journals and 9 book chapters, which have been very well received.

A complete list of her grants and publications can be found here: lidiakcmanzo.com