Saila-Maria Saaristo is a post-doctoral Researcher at DINÂMIA'CET within the project Care4Housing. A scholar of urban theory, inequality, social justice, and race and gender, Saaristo earned her Master's in Social and Cultural Anthropology (2009) and a Ph.D. in Global Development Studies (2022) at the University of Helsinki and the University of Coimbra. Her Ph.D. thesis, titled "Transgressive Participation: Housing struggles, occupations and evictions in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area", explores the phenomena of occupations and struggle against evictions in social housing estates, exploring the roles of diverse actors in these processes, such as residents, managers of social housing estates, and social movement activists.

 

Her work emerges at the intersection of critical urban, race and gender studies, and debates housing precarity, social justice and social mobilisation, bringing together and juxtaposing the contexts of the Global South and North. More recently, she had paid specific attention to the question of care labour and social reproduction in relation to housing precarity.