Julia Rehsmann is a social anthropologist working on issues around temporality, technology and materiality in the context of palliative care and transplantation medicine. She is a research associate at the Institute of Social Anthropology at the University of Bern and postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Health Professions at the Bern University of Applied Sciences BFH, conducting ethnographic research on palliative care in Switzerland in the interdisciplinary SNF project "Settings of Dying" (project no. 188869). She conducted the research for her dissertation as part of the SNF-funded project "Intimate Uncertainties" (project no. 49368) and was a Doc.Mobility fellowship at the University of Liverpool. In addition to her research at the BFH and her academic work at the University of Bern, Julia teaches courses in medical anthropology at the University of Lucerne.
Julia studied cultural and social anthropology at the University of Vienna and graduated in 2012 with her thesis "Act of Violence - Act of Love", in which she explored transnational adoption between Austria and Ethiopia. Together with Sarah Hildebrand, Gerhild Perl and Veronika Siegl she published the book "Hope", a collaboration between social anthropology, photography and literature.
Her research interests include:
- Temporality, waiting
- Medical anthropology, especially organ transplants, palliative care, gender medicine
- Transnational adoption
- Qualitative methods
- Regional focus: Europe (mainly Germany, Switzerland, Austria)
