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 of the Lisbon metropolitan area, exploring the roles of diverse actors in these processes, such as residents, social movement activists, and managers of the social housing estates.

Her work emerges 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 has paid specific attention to the question of care labour and social reproduction in relation to housing precarity. Within the current research project, she is developing participatory action research in six neighbourhoods of Loures, Portugal,  contributing towards the development of counter-proposals to official plans for the neighbourhoods, including the consideration of Community Land Trusts.