I am a researcher in environmental humanities and design studies, with regional expertise in Italy and Australia and a focus on urban ecologies amid the growing impact of climate change on cities. My work is organised around three main themes: investigating urban waterscapes to explore how water shapes social, cultural, and environmental processes; examining everyday practices of care and connection to the environment; Italian migration and the urban environment. Central to this work is exploring how design–broadly conceived–can amplify people's capacity to act and bring about positive change. I employ a range of place-based methodologies, including feminist, ethnographic, archival and visual approaches.

My latest book, Neighbourhood Ecologies. Creative Ethnographies of Urban Environments (Palgrave 2025, with Alexandra Crosby) foregrounds socioecological stewardship in urban spaces. It demonstrates how activities like gardening and participating in events that spark ecological learning foster a sense of place, social connections, and lively neighbourhoods.

My current projects are:

Water Stories: This project explores urban water environments to uncover how water shapes the social, cultural, and environmental narratives of places. This study, funded by the ARC DP240101955 grant, concentrates on uncovering the history of wetlands in urban renewal areas of Sydney.

Migrant environments: this research explores the environmental practices of migrant gardeners in Australia in relation to local ecologies.

In 2014, I co-founded Mapping Edges Research Studio (www.mappingedges.org) with Alexandra Crosby. Through ethnographic and archival research combined with design methods, Mapping Edges supported city residents' engagement with local ecologies and explored the intersections of agency, environment and place.

In past projects, I have written on design activism in Italy and on design, material culture, and creative practices in transcultural processes. My book, Precarious Objects: Activism and Design in Italy (UMP 2020), examines the intersection of design and visual culture with urban activism, demonstrating how design can challenge, mitigate, and reimagine the impacts of precarity. In this way, my work expands research on precarity to design studies and extends the conversation on precarity within the English-speaking world.

In 2022, I received an Australian Council for Graduate Research Special Commendation for Excellence in Supervision and won the UTS Research Excellence Award in the category of Supervisor of the Year. As a postgraduate research supervisor, I am committed to Indigenous higher education.