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Prof. Dr. Elke Grittmann

Elke Grittmann is professor of media and society at the University of Applied Sciences in Magdeburg-Stendal. She studied art history, journalism and communication studies, and political science at University of Hamburg. She received her PhD in Journalism and Communication from the University of Hamburg with a doctoral dissertation on political communication in news photography and photojournalism. She has been a co-investigator in different collaborative research projects, e.g. on gender and leadership, and the media coverage of right-wing violence against migrants. More recently she has turned her attention to gender, refugee and media research. Elke Grittmann is chair of the “Media, the Public Sphere, and Gender” division at the German Association for Communication (DGPuK). Her research areas include: Visual communication/photojournalism; international and transnational communication; refugees, migration, and media; gender media studies; media ethics, and journalism and memory. She was also a co-author, with Prof. Dr. Tanja Thomas (Tübingen) and Prof. Dr. Fabian Virchow (Düssel¬dorf), of 'Das Unwort erklärt die Untat' – Die Berichterstattung über die NSU-Morde – eine Medienkritik" (Frankfurt 2015), a research project funded by the Otto Brenner Stiftung.

Prof. Dr. Sabine Hess

Prof. Dr. Sabine Hess has been professor at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology, University of Göttingen since 2011. Her main areas of research and teaching are migration and border regime studies, the anthropology of globalization and transnationalism, the anthropology of policy with a focus on EU integration and processes of Europeanization, gender studies, and anthropological methodologies. She wrote her PhD thesis on the transnational migration of Slovakian women for domestic work at the Frankfurt institute for Cultural Anthropology, published as “Globalisierte Hausarbeit. Au-Pair als Migrationsstrategie von Frauen aus Osteuropa (Globalized domestic work: Au-pair as a migratory strategy of Eastern European Women)” (2005); she was coordinator of and researcher at “TRANSIT MIGRATION,” a Europe-wide research and film project founded by the Cultural Foundation of Germany, from 2003 until 2005. Between 2006 and 2010 she worked as an assistant professor at the Institute for Folklore Studies and European Ethnology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She has been the scientific curator of several interdisciplinary research projects and exhibitions on the history of immigration to German Cities, such as “Crossing Munich: Places, images and discussions on migration in Munich” (2007-2009) and “Movements of Migration: A knowledge archive on migration in Göttingen” (2011-2013). Additionally, she has been directing research projects on the European border regime in southeast Europe and Germany alike, funded by national research foundations. She coordinates the interdisciplinary “Laboratory on Migration and Border Regime Studies” at the University of Göttingen, which provides space for regular discussions on theories and research in these fields for 15 PhD students and Postdocs. She is co-founder of the interdisciplinary European-wide “Network for Critical Migration- and Border-Regime Research” (kritnet) and member of the Germanwide “Rat für Migration” (Council for Migration) as well as a board member of the Göttingen Center for Gender Studies.

Prof. Dr. Helen Schwenken

Prof. Dr. Helen Schwenken is professor of Migration and Society at the School of Cultural Studies and Social Sciences and at the Institute of Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) at Osnabrück University. She is co-coordinator of the Gender Studies research center at Osnabrück University and one of the coordinators of the international Research Network for Domestic Workers’ Rights (RN-DWR). She has been Assistant Professor of Migration and Decent Work at Kassel University and at the International Center for Development and Decent Work (ICDD). She completed her dissertation at Kassel University with a discussion on political mobilization among irregular migration in the EU (“Rechtlos, aber nicht ohne Stimme, 2006, transcript). Before she graduated from her Diploma program in social sciences at Ruhr- University Bochum. Her research focuses on migration studies (especially work and forced migration), gender and social movements. She is and has been principle investigator of diverse projects, amongst others of the research project ‘Taking Sides’, a trilateral comparison of protests against deportation (the German subproject is DFG-funded and runs from 2013 till 2017; in cooperation with the University of Vienna and the Université de Neuchâtel) and the project “Interessenvertretung – Kooperation – Konflikt” on the relationship of migrant self-organisation and trade unions in the 1970 and 80s (funded by the Hans Boeckler Foundation, in cooperation with the University of Göttingen, project term from 2017 till 2020).