Anna Wyss is a social scientist interested in different mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion and in the experience as well as the state administration of migration. Theoretically, she approaches these themes from the perspectives of critical migration and border regime studies, the anthropology and sociology of law, as well as from intersectional perspectives. She has conducted ethnographic research in Switzerland, Germany, Indonesia, Italy, Malta and Austria.
Anna Wyss studied anthropology and sociology at the Universities of Bern and Zurich. In 2019, she completed her PhD in Sociology at the University of Bern. Her doctoral thesis follows the interrupted journeys of those who seek, but have little hope of achieving, permanent residence status in European countries, tracking their successive migrations, detentions and deportations within and beyond the continent. It explores migrants’ navigation of the European migration regime, their everyday resistance, but also the impact of legal and economic precarity on their lives. The dissertation project was funded by a Doc.CH grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and won the SNIS Award in 2020. In 2017, Anna Wyss was a visiting researcher at the Sussex Centre of Migration Research and in 2017/2018 at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology (Law and Anthropology Department).
As part of the project Engendering migration, development and belonging: The experiences of recently arrived Afghans in Europe, Anna Wyss was employed at the Laboratoire d'études des processus sociaux (LAPS) at the University of Neuchâtel from 2017 to 2019. From 2020 to 2022, she has been working as part of the ‘nccr – on the move’ project Small Localities at the Peripheries of Europe: Transnational Mobilities, Diversification and Multi-Scalar Place-Making. Since 2021, Anna Wyss has been part of the SNSF project Homelessness in Switzerland and Germany – Legal Consciousness and Legal Mobilisation at the Institute of Public Law in Bern.
Anna Wyss is co-author of the book Migrants before the Law (Palgrave 2019), which was translated into German by the Hamburger Edition Verlag in 2020, and author of the monograph Navigating the European Migration Regime (2022, Bristol University Press).
Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7533-0640