I am a medical anthropologist and senior research fellow at the University of Bern and Bern University of Applied Sciences. Most recently, I've led the collaborative research project "Pandemic Objects", which used (design-) ethnographic research methods to explore how the Covid-19 pandemic affected everyday work in a Swiss hospital and was published as a special exhibition in the online museum of the Medical Collection Inselspital Bern. Until recently, I've been working as a postdoctoral researcher on the interdisciplinary research project "Sterbesettings/Settings of Dying", a collaboration with the Bern University of the Arts and the Zurich University of the Arts, on inpatient palliative care in Switzerland. In this project, I was particularly interested in gender in health care and the negotiation of expertise in interdisciplinary and transprofessional settings.
My PhD research focused on liver transplants and temporality in Germany, exploring the existential, political and technological dimensions of waiting in transplant medicine. I conducted research on this topic as part of the "Intimate Uncertainties" project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, and was a visiting scholar at the Brocher Foundation in Geneva and an SNSF-funded Doc.Mobility fellow at the University of Liverpool.
I studied cultural and social anthropology at the University of Vienna and graduated in 2012 with the thesis "Act of Violence - Act of Love", in which I explored transnational adoption between Austria and Ethiopia. Together with Sarah Hildebrand, Gerhild Perl, and Veronika Siegl, I published the book "Hope", a collaboration between social anthropology, photography, and literature.
Her research interests include:
- Temporality, materiality, hospitals as more-than-medical spaces
- Organ transplants, palliative care, gender medicine
- Interdisciplinary research
- Qualitative methods, participatory approaches
- Regional focus: Europe (mainly Germany, Switzerland, Austria)
