Mona Makinejad

Profile

I started my academic journey completing BA in Sociology from University of Tehran in 2018; during my BA, I worked in different NGOs that aim to support refugees and immigrants. In 2019, I completed my MA in Social Research at the University of Leeds. My Master dissertation was Qualitative research on socio-economic integration of the second generation of Afghan immigrants (the second largest group of refugees in the world) in Tehran; the focus of my Master research was examining the main barriers that this group of immigrants face in public outcomes in sectors such as housing, education, employment, and health care system. The methodological courses of my Master's degree and doing a Master's dissertation on socio-economic integration of Afghan immigrants provided me an influential opportunity to do my PhD project on the political agency of refugees and migrants. In January 2021, I was offered the opportunity to pursue my PhD under the supervision of Dr. Roxana Barbulescu and Professor S. Sayyid at the Department of Sociology and Social Policy.

Research interests

My PhD project aims to examine the activism of second and third generation of Afghan migrants as political subjectivity in Iran. I investigate the problem of how Afghan immigrants' counter-publics in Iran created a counter-hegemonic heterotopia and formed Afghan immigrants as political subjectivity through a qualitative approach.  In this research, I aim to contribute to the critical debates about reframing refugees' concept, political agency and civil society. I approach this complex by focusing on the activism and political agency of Afghan migrants as a subaltern group in the global migration system. Moreover, I have research interest in other topics and research areas such as Racism and Ethnicity Studies, Refugee and Migrants' integration studies, Decoloniality studies.

Qualifications

• BA Sociology, University of Tehran
• MA Social Research, University of Leeds