Curriculum Vitae

I am a social anthropologist with interdisciplinary orientation. My PhD, acquired in an interdisciplinary PhD program at the University of East Anglia, was oriented towards anthropological theories and methods. This anthropological expertise was further developed during my time at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale) before I joined Bielefeld University’s Faculty of Sociology. My current research focuses on labour, mobility and migration, care and welfare China, Vietnam, Southeast Asia and more generally. My publications analyze the social transformations generated by the mobility of labour and changing care and welfare regimes, as well as the implications of global processes on people’s daily economic practices and local systems of meanings. The questions of how the movement of people intersects with the commodification of labour, how the labour force is cared for, and what notions of the good life motivate people in global societies have been central to this work. Increasingly I am also interested in the ramifications of financialization for labour and the lives of ordinary people.

Professional Career

Education

Awards and Nominations

• Nominated by the Swiss National Science Foundation for the online portal AcademiaNet: Profiles of Leading Female Scientists (2020).
• Member of Steering Group, 3. UK-German Frontiers of Humanities Symposium on “Mobilities” by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and British Academy (2022). 
• Member of the Academy of Finland Social Sciences 3’s Review Panel for its annual grant program (2021). 
• Book Prize of American Anthropological Association's Society for the Anthropology of Work (2019).
• Visiting professorship, University of Social Science and Humanities, National University, Hanoi (since 2018). 

Third-party funding

• PI in joint DFG Research Training Group by Bielefeld University and University of Duisburg-Essen on "Cross-border Labour Markets: Transnational Market Makers, Infrastructures, Institutions" (funded by the German Research Foundation, 2024-29, €6.700.000). Homepage: https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/soziologie/forschung/projekte/grk2951/
• European Research Council Starting Grant “Welfare for Migrant Factory Workers: Moral Struggles and Politics ofCare” (2019-24, €1.500.000). Homepage: https://www.uni-bielefeld.de/fakultaeten/soziologie/forschung/projekte/welfarestruggles/
• ZIF Working Groups (Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, Bielefeld): "The Good Life in Late Socialist Asia: Aspirations, Politics, Possibilities" (2018-19, €10.000); “Reconfiguring Labour and Welfare in Emerging Economies of the Global South” (2021, €15.000); and “The Politics of Care under Market Socialism: Labor, Welfare and Global Capital in China and Vietnam” (2022-23, €15.000).

Administrative functions and honorary appointments

Review and evaluation

Journals

Anthropological Theory, American Ethnologist, American Anthropologist, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Men and Masculinities, Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Third World Quarterly, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Asian Population Studies, Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology, Cultural Anthropology, Canadian Journal of Anthropology, Development and Change; Journal of Vietnamese Studies; Pacific Affairs; Journal of Economic Anthropology, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies; China Information, China Review, World Development Perspective, and others.

Review and evaluation

Institutions

University of Vienna, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), Irish Research Council, Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Central European University, Berghahn Books, European Research Council, Cornell University Press, University of Amsterdam, German Research Foundation (DFG), Swedish International Foundation for Science, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Free University of Berlin, University of California at Riverside, and others.

Conferences, Workshops and Conference Panels

Invited lectures and presentations at

Vietnam Update Conference at Australian National University; Institute of Anthropology, Vietnam Academy of Social Science; Institute of Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences; School of International Development, University of East Anglia, UK; Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany; Institute of Cultural Studies, Vietnam Academy of Social Science; Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland; Leibniz Institute of Agricultural Development in Transitional Economies, Germany; Global South Studies Center, University of Cologne, Germany; Institute for Studies of Society, Economics and Environment, Vietnam; Bielefeld Center for Interdisciplinary Research, Germany; Department of Gender Studies, Lund University, Sweden; Department of Sociology, University of Nanjing, China; Elite Graduate Program "Standards of Decision-Making Across Cultures”, FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany; School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, UK; Duisburg University, Germany; Edinburgh University, UK; Issues of Globalization Roundtable, AAA Meeting in Vancouver, Canada; STAR 1 Training Program for PhD students of all universities in Scotland (keynote); European Institute of China Studies, France; Vietnam Research Snapshots online lecture series; Department of East Asian Studies at the University Paris Cité, France.