Anna Wyss

Former Staff
C.V. | Publications | Current Project
Research Interests

(irregular) migration, refugee studies, mobility studies, anthropology of law, postcolonial theory, gender studies, marriage, new kinship studies

Research Areas
Europe (especially Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Austria), Indonesia

Profile  

Anna Wyss is a PhD candidate at the University of Bern and a writing-up fellow in the Law and Anthropology Department of the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. She holds an MA in Social Anthropology, Sociology and Slavic Linguistics from the University of Zurich.

Anna Wyss collected extensive experience in qualitative research both during the fieldwork for her master’s thesis (in Indonesia) and for her PhD on irregular migration in the Schengen area.

Her multi-sited ethnographic dissertation project (funded by the Doc.CH scheme of the Swiss National Science Foundation) looks at the fragmented journeys of migrants with precarious legal status within Europe. More concretely, she studies to what extent and how migrants with a poor chance of being granted legal residence status in Europe can circumvent the increasingly restrictive migration policies. Furthermore, she is especially interested in how the implementation of migration law is experienced by individual migrants, and how migration policies can have the unintended consequence of increasing the distance and duration of migrants’ already lengthy journeys within Europe.

Why Law & Anthropology?

Anthropological approaches have the capability of providing new insights not only into how law works in practice (such as in street-level bureaucracy approaches), but also how law is accessed, appropriated and experienced by individual actors. Zooming in on the lived experiences of irregular migrants – as I do within the scope of my project – tells us a lot about how law functions – and how it often fails. I believe that the question of how law is experienced by individual subjects whose simple presence is defined as ‘illegal’ is an important contribution to the field of anthropology of law. Law, its implementation, and the negotiations revolving around it shape such migrants’ trajectories to a great extent. It is law that produces the illegality in which migrants find themselves. At the same time people hope to be able to regularize their illegal status through legal means. Questions regarding access to law, illegibility of law (Das 2004), and the transfer of legal knowledge are, therefore, of great interest to me.

Together with my colleagues at the University of Bern, I am currently working on a co-authored book that looks from different angles at the control of irregular migration within Europe. We discuss how numerous processes within this field often operate ‘in between laws’. The book will address themes such as bureaucratic mechanisms, access to law, absence of law, rumours of rights and diffusion of responsibilities from a variety perspectives (migrant subjects, border police, migration officials, legal counsellors, etc.).

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