- Sustainability, transformation
- Im/mobility, migration, labour, health care
- Social theory and questions of in/justice & emancipation
- Transdisciplinarity, social learning
- Methodological approaches and knowledge co-production between research, academia, (digital) media and art
I am professor of Geography and Critical Sustainability Studies and currently director of the institute. My research focuses on societal transformation, justice and sustainability at the interfaces of migration, im/mobilities, work and education. I am interested in social learning processes and transdisciplinarity, particularly making new media, art and digital technologies an integral part of research activities and developing unorthodox coalitions of aesthetics and geography.
I am the founder and now co-director of the mLAB at the Institute of Geography. As one of the many mLAB acitivities I am co-leading the Global Science Film Festival with Samer Angelone and Mirko Winkel.
Before coming to Bern (2017) I held a professorship at the Freie Universität Berlin in Geography of Transformation and Globalization. Earlier stages of my career were the University of Zurich (PhD and Habilitation) and visiting fellowships at the University of Sussex (UK), the American University of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan) and the Institute of Social Studies de Hague (NL).
My biography is strongly linked to the politics of im/mobilities of people and knowledge.
As PhD and postdoc I was involved in the Swiss National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) North-South, a global network of institutions researching global change and sustainable development.
The strong take on inter- and transdisciplinarity very much influenced my point of view on academic practices.
Furthermore I highly benefited from long research stays in South and Central Asia.
Born in the German Democratic Republic (former GDR), with German citizenship since 1991 and later with Swiss citizenship, I have experienced various forms of exclusion and then increasing societal participation.
Without the political changes of 1989 my professional path would have been very different. While my parents' and grandparents' generations experienced precarity and devaluation of work experiences and degrees with all the new opportunities coming along, I meanwhile benefited from studies and internships abroad and later from moving to Switzerland. At the same time, like nearly a quarter of the population, I had no formal political participation in Switzerland for twelve years.
Now, with my dual citizenship and my professional status, I have almost unlimited mobility options in a highly unequal world where the mobility of the majority of people is highly selective, restricted and securitized.
