Dr Altaf Hossain has received a Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Postdoctoral Fellowship to conduct research on the UCD-coordinated HOUSING PRECARITY project.

With a total budget of €257 million, the European Commission is supporting 1235 top-notch postdoc researchers to implement their own research project, while developing their skills.

“I am delighted to receive this Fellowship which will allow me to expand my research network across the globe.” said Dr Hossain, who holds a Bachelor of Social Science (BSS) and Master of Social Science (MSS) in Anthropology from Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh, and a PhD in Anthropology from Maynooth University.

Professor Michelle Norris, Director of UCD Geary Institute for Public Policy, is the Project Supervisor. She said: “This project aims to investigate South Asian migrants' lived experience of precariousness in terms of housing, labour market activity and immigration status in Dublin, and the interaction between these. Congratulations to Dr Hossain on receiving this Fellowship, we look forward to working with him at the Geary Institute.”

Housing affordability and homelessness have been persistent problems in Ireland over the last decade, these problems are particularly acute among migrants. With the exception of those who are seeking asylum, non-EEA migrants’ housing challenges have been largely ignored by policymakers in Ireland to date and have received little attention from researchers. In particular, the relationship between housing precarity and issues like labour market discrimination or legal status, have not been explored in depth. 

The HOUSING PRECARITY project will fill these critical knowledge gaps by engaging with South Asian migrants in Ireland’s capital to learn about their lived experiences, their responses to these challenges, and their agency in trying to shape pathways to overcome them. The project’s ground-breaking, multi-method anthropological approach goes beyond the current state-of-the-art, and has the potential to illuminate the experiences of other marginalised groups in Ireland and internationally. 

The European Research Executive Agency (REA) received 7,044 applications for this call, 17.5% of which were selected for funding. Find out more about Marie Skłodowska-Curie awards here.