Dr. Melissa Fernández Arrigoitia is one of the programme officers for this HEIF5 project. She is a Research Officer at LSE London where she carries out investigations to do with the capital’s social, economic and political life, particularly around housing issues.

Melissa is also a lecturer in Birkbeck’s ‘Culture Diaspora Ethnicity’ MA and has taught gender and politics at Queen Mary University. She completed a PhD on the political, material and symbolic co-productions of public housing in Puerto Rico (LSE, Sociology-Cities) and has an MSc in Gender and International Development and a BA in Philosophy and Women’s Studies. She is interested in the links between housing displacement, urban development and activism; interdisciplinary approaches to processes of urban ‘othering’ including the imports of gender, race and postcolonial theories to cultural and urban studies; and in critical geographies of home. She has previously worked in the field of international human rights in the UK, U.S., and Puerto Rico.