Dr. Sarah Schilliger joins the SPUR team
Dr. Sarah Schilliger joins the SPUR team as a senior researcher in the project ‘Urban Essential Workers’ (NRP-80 of Swiss National Science Foundation) where she investigates the working realities and politics of regulation in the sectors of cleaning, urban transport, childcare and food retailing.
Sarah Schilliger is a sociologist and works on intersectional inequalities in the city and politics of social transformation. As a senior researcher in the project ‘Urban Essential Workers’ (NRP-80 of Swiss National Science Foundation), she investigates the working realities and politics of regulation in the sectors of cleaning, urban transport, childcare and food retailing.
She studied political science, sociology and philosophy at the University of Zürich. She obtained her Ph.D. from the University of Basel in 2014 with an ethnographic study on live-in care workers from Eastern Europe. As a postdoc, she was a guest researcher at the University of Vienna, York University in Toronto and University of Osnabrück.
From 2021 to 2025, she is a Principal Investigator of the international research project external page ‘Enacting Citizenship and Solidarity from Below’, which examines local policies and movements in ten European cities in response to crises of care & housing.
Besides her part-time position at ETH Zurich (50%), Sarah Schilliger is a Senior Researcher and Lecturer at the external page Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Bern and teaches in Social Work at the Bern University of Applied Sciences and the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland. She is a founding member of the external page LABORIS labor research network and is part of the scientific advisory board of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
