Anna Wyss is Ambizione Fellow at the Institute for Social Anthropology, University of Bern (2025–2029). Her project investigates how social categories such as gender, race, class, and legal status shape everyday legal practices in Swiss social assistance law. Using ethnographic methods, she and a PhD student examine how state and non-state actors influence access to law, highlighting intersectional legal exclusions.
More broadly, Anna Wyss’s research explores mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, as well as on the lived experiences and state governance of migration and precarity. Her work is grounded in critical migration and border regime studies, the anthropology and sociology of law, and intersectional approaches. She has conducted research in Switzerland, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, and Malta.
Anna Wyss earned her PhD in Sociology from the University of Bern in 2019. Her doctoral thesis traces the interrupted journeys of people on the move seeking permanent residence in Europe, examining their successive migrations, detentions, and deportations. The study highlights how individuals with a precarious legal status navigate the European migration regime, engage in everyday forms of resistance, and experience the effects of legal and economic precarity in their lives. The doctoral project was funded by a Doc.CH grant (SNSF) and received the SNIS Award in 2020. Anna Wyss was a visiting researcher at the Sussex Centre for Migration Research (2017) and at the ‘Law & Anthropology’ Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (2017/2018).
Further completed research projects:
