Dr. Sarah Hartmann

Postdoc Project since 2022: 

Healthcare unbound: towards more just and sustainable work and mobilities in healthcare – insights from Romania and Switzerland

This postdoctoral project (since 2022) explores where capacities for change towards more just and sustainable work, education and mobilities in healthcare might lie based on empirical research in Romania, a country with high rates of emigrating doctors, and Switzerland, whose healthcare system is highly dependent on foreign professionals.

Situated at the intersection of education, work and mobility, the project engages with the perspectives of local and international medical students, practising doctors, union representatives, educational institutions and health policy actors. It investigates professional imaginaries, aspirations for ‘good’ work, and orientations toward mobility that take shape within specific institutional, social, political and economic environments, and how these relate to broader multiscalar (dis)connections between places, policies and professional pathways.

Drawing on justice-oriented theoretical approaches—particularly mobility justice, debates on just and sustainable work, and emancipation—the project analyses how experiences and insights from Romania and Switzerland reflect wider transformations in healthcare education, work and mobilities. By tracing how individuals and institutions navigate opportunities, constraints and shifting professional landscapes, it illuminates how the future of healthcare work is imagined and negotiated across borders.

In addition to classic qualitative research methods, the project draws on creative, arts-based approaches to research, using film both as a methodological tool and as a medium for communicating findings to wider audiences. In collaboration with a filmmaker and the mLAB, it integrates visual and collaborative methods into its research practice.

Team:

Dr. Sarah Hartmann  - project lead and main researcher
Dr. Elena Trifa – research assistant
Dr. Ileana Szasz – visual anthropologist and filmmaker

The project is part of "Healthcare unbound: A transnational perspective on the future of the world of work in health care"

Publications

• Hartmann, S., Thieme, S., Bigler, C. (2026): Protest, withdrawal, and change: Practices of resistance and emancipation in healthcare work, Health & Place, 99, 103670, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.healthplace.2026.103670 
• Susan Thieme, Sony K.C., Bigler, C. (2025): ‘A bucket in the ocean’: Justice transitions and the emancipatory potential of establishing mental health care in Nepal, Social Science & Medicine, 383, 118397, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118397.
• KC Sony, Bigler, Christine and Thieme, Susan (2025): Claiming justice in the health sector of Nepal: Exploring causes and consequences of protests among health care workers. Dialogues in Health, 7, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dialog.2025.100223
• Thieme, S., M. Richter & C. Ammann (2022): Economic Rationalities and Notions of ‘Good Cure and Care’. Medical Anthropology, 41(4), 460-473.
• Ammann, C., J. Mall, M. Richter & S. Thieme (2020): Negotiating social differences and power geometries among healthcare professionals in a Swiss hospital. Gender, Place&Culture, 28(12), 1715-1737.
• Ammann, C., M. Richter & S. Thieme (2020): Analytical and Methodological Disruptions: Implications of an Institutional Ethnography in a Swiss Acute Hospital. ZDfm – Zeitschrift für Diversitätsforschung und -management, 1-2020, 71-75.

Postdoc Project 2021 - 2022:

Building and assessing trust in platform-mediated care and domestic work in Delhi

This project explores platformisation in the feminised sectors of care and domestic work and focuses on trust as a critical factor in digital labour mediation. The aim is to analyse strategies of trust building and assessing trustworthiness from a multi-stakeholder perspective (platforms, gig workers and customers). This to better understand issues arising from digitalisation in a sector that that requires location-based work in private spaces. The project looks at the situation in Delhi, India, a global hub in digital work with a booming gig economy, to analyse how digital labour platforms shape trust and employment relations in a sector known for highly gendered, informal, precarious and invisible labour.

https://www.geo.uzh.ch/en/department/Staff/sarahhartmann

PhD Project 2016 - 2020:

Medical travel facilitation between Oman and India: Articulating spaces, creating smoothness and negotiating ethical complexities

My thesis is set in the context of transnational healthcare and looks at medical travel from Oman to India with a specific focus on practices of medical travel facilitation. This offers a route into better understanding how these practices contribute to making transnational healthcare, and care, possible, feasible and possibly ‘good enough’ for patients to consider. Working through different dimensions of medical travel facilitation in conversation with recent work on care in Science and Technology Studies and the ethics of care, I explore three interrelated ways in which these practices are integral to transnational healthcare: first, for how they articulate spaces and spatialities, second, for the way they make transnational healthcare ‘smooth’ and third, for how they negotiate ethical complexities.     
The empirically informed theorisation of the relationships between facilitation and care as encountered in ethnographic fieldwork in Oman and India contributes to current debates about (transnational) configurations of care in the fields of ethics, policy, and Science and Technology Studies in geography and beyond.