Research interests
Migration and mobility, bordering practices, precarity and uncertainty, temporality and waiting, solidarity, gender, urban ethnography, multimodal methods, material culture
Research area
Europe (Italy and Switzerland); China
Short bio
Dr. Michelle von Dach is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in social and cultural anthropology at the University of Zurich (ISEK). She holds a PhD from the University of Zurich.
Her research spans a wide range of ethnographic contexts and disciplinary conversations. Her doctoral research project “Stuckedness in the Lives of Migrants in Rome. An Ethnography of Everyday Navigation of an Existential Condition” is based on long-term fieldwork in the Italian capital with migrant-led grassroots associations and civil society organisations, as well as with migrants that experienced irregolarisation during their stay in Italy. With a focus on lived experiences of precarity, uncertainty and temporal liminality, it introduces stuckedness as an analytical framework to understand a structural and cyclical migrant condition in Southern Europe that suspends migrants in place, time and life, often indefinitely.
As part of a collaborative fieldwork excursion organized by the CUSO Swiss Graduate Program in Anthropology, she investigated how Yellowstone National Park’s conservation model erases Indigenous presence, and how Native communities are actively reclaiming their ties to the land. The group’s findings were presented through a multimodal website combining film, visual essays, sound and text. “An Ethnographic Multimodal Journey Through Yellowstone National Park and the Wind River Reservation”
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the Venetian lagoon, she examined how (professional) women rowers navigate and contest gender discrimination. She traced how exclusion operates formally and informally through rigged gondolier exams, unequal prize money in sports regattas, and everyday exclusion in clubs and on the water.
Earlier fieldwork in Longquan, China examined celadon craftsmanship and its musealization.
Prior to her current position, she was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford (2025), at the AIMS Lab BRISPO, Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2024–2025), and a Resident Fellow at the Istituto Svizzero in Rome (2022–2023).
She is member of the editorial board of ZANTHRO