Sabine Hess

Professor at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology at the University of Göttingen since 2011, specializing in the challenges of postmigrant societies. Since 2018, she has served as Executive Director of the Center for Global Migration Studies (CeMig) at the University of Göttingen, shaping its strategic direction.

Her academic background spans institutions in Tübingen (studies in European Ethnology, History, and Political Science), Birmingham (CCCS), Frankfurt (PhD in Cultural Anthropology), Berlin (research assistant for “SFB Repräsentationen sozialer Ordnung im Wandel”), and Munich (Academic Councillor). She draws on international Cultural and Social Anthropology to address contemporary societal challenges.

As a political anthropologist, her work examines the social, cultural, and political governance of immigration and transit migration, with a focus on gender as an intersectional structural category. She has contributed significantly to border research through the Laboratory for Critical Migration and Border Regime Research and co-founded the open-access journal movements. Journal for Critical Migration and Border Regime Studies.

Her research has been supported by European, national, and local projects and collaborative initiatives such as exhibitions with artists (Projekt Migration, Crossing Munich). She also founded “kritnet,” the network for critical migration and border regime research, and remains active in public anthropology, interdisciplinary collaboration, and knowledge transfer projects like “Migration bewegt die Stadt” and “Wir wollen Sicherheit.”