Team

Prof. Dr. Helena Hof
Principal Investigator
helena.hof@uzh.ch
Profile

Helena Hof is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Zurich and Principal Investigator of the SNSF Starting Grant project “Provisional Futures: Migrants as wanted workers, yet temporary residents (TEMP Migration)”. She is responsible for the overall conceptualization of the project and is actively involved in the research, working on the Swiss case study and taking care of the IT and construction sectors.

Melanie Jane Jäger
PhD Candidate
melanie.jaeger@uzh.ch

Melanie Jäger will be a PhD candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology and working on the SNSF project «Provisional Futures: Migrants as wanted workers, yet temporary residents (TEMP Migration)». Her focus in the project are migrant nurses working in Switzerland. She is supervised by Prof. Dr. Helena Hof.

Lydia Huber
Student Assistant
lydiaalexandra.huber@uzh.ch

Lydia Huber is a master’s student in Japanese Studies and Political Science at the University of Zurich and has been supporting the project and its previous pilot study as a student research assistant since 2025.

As part of the project, she conducts research on foreign workers in Japan's healthcare, construction, and IT sectors. Her responsibilities include literature reviews in English and Japanese, the analysis of media reports, the identification of relevant companies, organizations, and individuals, as well as research on Japanese visa and migration policies related to these sectors. In addition, she researches literature and media reports on foreign workers in the same sectors in Switzerland in both German and French.

In her master’s thesis, she examines the position and experiences of highly skilled foreign and Japanese women in the Japanese labour market and Japanese society.

A postdoc working on Canada and a postdoc working on Japan will join the team in February 2027.