Meet the researchers and academics involved in the Migrant Futures Institute.
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Director
Professor Bridget Anderson
Professor Bridget Anderson will lead the MFI, focusing on advancing migration research and addressing the challenges faced by migrants through research, partnerships and engagement with migrant communities locally, nationally and internationally.
Professor Anderson joins Goldsmiths from the University of Bristol, where she is Professor of Migration, Mobilities and Citizenship and Director of Migration Mobilities Bristol (MMB).
Co-Directors
Dr Sultan Doughan
Sultan Doughan is a political anthropologist specialising in the secular governance of religious difference within liberal democracies in Europe. Her current book project, tentatively titled 'Converting Citizens: German Secularism and the Politics of Holocaust Memory,' is based on fieldwork in Germany and approaches citizenship as a practice and technology of secular conversion.
Sultan's main concern is how debates on memory, race, migration and religious difference after the genocide of European Jewry generate, shape, and minoritise Middle Eastern diasporas as Muslim. She explores how the memory of violence inscribes state-funded educational institutions in Germany to become arbiters of injury, hierarchising suffering and belonging with grave consequences for contemporary migrant communities and their access to legal and political rights.
Sultan also focuses on migrant archival practices, memorial and museum spaces, and efforts for repair amidst ongoing state and police violence and the deferral of justice.
Mirca Madianou is Professor in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies. She has a long-standing interest in migration and humanitarian emergencies and their intersection with digital technologies and infrastructures.
In particular, her work investigates the role played by digital technologies in shaping processes of inequality and social change in transnational and postcolonial contexts.
Mirca Madianou is Professor in the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies. She has a long-standing interest in migration and humanitarian emergencies and their intersection with digital technologies and infrastructures.
In particular, her work investigates the role played by digital technologies in shaping processes of inequality and social change in transnational and postcolonial contexts.
Her recent book Technocolonialism: when technology for good is harmful, which won the 2026 Outstanding Book Award of the International Communication Association, examines the role of digital infrastructures and artificial intelligence (AI) in humanitarian operations, including the response to refugee flows. Based on ten years of research, the book puts forward a new concept, ‘technocolonalism’, to analyse how the convergence of digital developments with humanitarian structures, state power and market forces reinvigorates and reworks colonial power relations which have been part of humanitarianism and AI.
Mirca is currently PI on the British Academy project ‘Reimagining Digital Identity practices among Karen refugees in Thailand’ which traces the consequences of biometric technologies in a refugee camp in Western Thailand. The project also employs participatory art methods to imagine alternative futures. The artwork produced by Karen co-researchers has been the focus of four international exhibitions including at the Migrant Futures Institute / Goldsmiths.
In earlier work, Madianou explored the phenomenon of transnational families through an ethnography of Filipino migrants in the UK and their children who remain in the Philippines. Her book Migration and New Media: transnational families and polymedia (co-authored with Daniel Miller) explores the contours of distant parenting – and the implications of technological mediation for ‘care at a distance’ and for the phenomenon of migration more broadly.
Kit Hung is a Hong Kong filmmaker and a PhD graduate from the Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. He founded the Secure Storyteller Network (SSN), supporting vulnerable, cross-border filmmakers and small production teams with safer workflows, digital security skills, and wellbeing-aware practice.
His work bridges film production, research, and training, with experience delivering multilingual workshops in Europe and Asia and teaching in community settings, including refugee contexts. He designs practical toolkits that combine consent ethics, data minimisation, and risk assessment for real productions, especially where surveillance and political pressure shape decisions.
SSN has been supported through Berlinale Talents Mastercard Enablement Programme, recognised with Deutsche Bank Awards for Creative Entrepreneurs, and sponsored by Yubico.
Dr Daria Lynch
Daria is a historian of cities, migration, and memory whose work asks a vital question: who gets to shape the stories our urban spaces tell? She holds a doctorate in History & Heritage Studies and works at the intersection of research, policy, and public practice, advancing new approaches to newcomer inclusion, multicultural heritage, and urban belonging. Her scholarship combines rigorous archival research and oral history with critical heritage theory, contributing to debates in urban studies, migration history, and the civic role of cultural institutions.
Over the past decade, Daria has worked across academic, cultural, and policy sectors, partnering with museums, NGOs, and local authorities to co-create projects that amplify migrant and refugee voices. Her practice is grounded in community-based, participatory methods - from collaborative storytelling and workshops to collection development and public programming - ensuring that heritage spaces become more inclusive, representative, and accountable.
She has collaborated with communities across the UK, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Turkey, Azerbaijan, India, and the United States, building transnational networks of research and engagement. The child of migrants from the Soviet Union to the United States, and a migrant to
Britain herself, Daria brings both scholarly expertise and lived experience to her work. She is committed to ethical, community-led heritage practice and to reshaping cultural institutions as sites of dialogue, equity, and social justice. For Daria, scholarship is not only about interpreting the past—it is a tool for transforming the present and building more inclusive urban futures.
Dr Myriam Dalal
Myriam is a multilingual Arab researcher and writer. Her work draws on participatory practices, public history, and artistic research to document absence and silence in contexts of political violence.
Following her Ph.D. in Arts and Sciences of Art from Sorbonne University in France, Dalal concluded a postdoctoral fellowship in public history, co-production, and participatory practices at the University of Luxembourg, where she worked with Portuguese, Cape Verdean, Syrian, and Palestinian communities to revisit Luxembourg’s history of migration.
She later served as a public history and outreach consultant for the public history axis at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History, where she managed multiple projects across the Global South, namely in Egypt, Kenya, Martinique, Qatar, and Lebanon. As an academic, Dalal taught photography and visual culture for more than four years at a University level in Lebanon, and her writings have appeared in journals, newspapers and platforms across the globe. Her monograph "The Image and the Regime" (Arabic, forthcoming) received the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture's Creative and Critical Writing grant.