Research

Our research group is interested in better understanding patterns of socio-spatial inequality in labour, migration and gender.

A) Digital Platform Workers

We explore the opportunities and challenges resulting from the rise of online labour platforms in Switzerland and beyond. We ask how digitalisation processes in labour mediation change the meaning of work itself and how work is organised socially, spatially and temporally. How do machine-based labour mediation and dematerialised social relations change working conditions? How does platform work shape workers' subjectivities?

Research projects:

Trinational WEAVE project: Urban Platform Economies: Transformation of labour and intersectional inequalities in care services 2022-2025

PhD project: Care and Domestic Work as on-demand services: Experiences and Working Realities of Workers in Geneva 2021-2025

PhD project: How digital labour platforms reshape spatio-temporal patterns of work 2019-2023

Postdoc-project: Building and assessing trust in platform-mediated care and domestic work in Delhi 2021-2023

B) Transnational Care Markets

Analysing the newly emerging markets of live-in home care services, we aim at understanding the consequences of the current reconfiguration of elderly care for migration patterns, labor markets, gender relations and the definition of care itself as a marketable good.

Research projects:
PhD project: Working conditions and care indicators in Ticinese nursing homes 2021-2025

Decent care work? Transnational Home Care Arrangements 2017-2021

Care markets. The role of care agencies in the commodification of elderly care 2013-2017


C) Processes of in- and exclusion in labour markets

We study how gendered and culturalised understandings of specific groups of people shape their educational trajectories and opportunities in the labour market. We analyse in what ways these trajectories are linked to imaginaries of motherhood, fatherhood and professions.

Research projects:

PhD project: Experiences of Underemployment in Switzerland’s Cleaning Sector 2024-2028

PhD project: (Im)Possible selves in the Swiss labour market: Temporalities, immigration regulations, and the production of precarious workers 2017-2021

Anticipated parenthood and employment trajectories 2013-2016

Gender inequalities in educational and career pathways 2010-2013

Life Plans. Young Adults caught between Individuality and Gender Norms 2005-2010