Organisation Committee

Monika Salzbrunn holds a full professorship in „Religions, Migration, Diasporas“ at Lausanne University. She is the first female scientist in Switzerland to receive the prestigious ERC Consolidator Grant in Social and Human Sciences, for her project on ARTIVISM. Art and Activism. Creativity and Performance as Subversive Forms of Political Expression in Super-Diverse Cities. The ERC’s mission is to encourage the highest quality research in Europe through competitive funding and to support investigator-driven frontier research across all fields, on the basis of scientific excellence. Prof. Salzbrunn was director of the Research Institute for Social Sciences of Contemporary Religions (ISSRC) from 2011 until 2015.

Currently, she is the principal investigator of the projects „(In)visible islam in the city: material and immaterial expressions of muslim practices within urban spaces in Switzerland“ and "Undocumented Mobility (Tunisia-Switzerland) and Digital-Cultural Resources after the 'Arab Spring'", funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. Furthermore, her team hosts an FNS Ambizione project, two FNS doc.ch projects as well as three FNS doc.mobility fellows. Professor Salzbrunn was principal investigator of numerous research projects (Emmy Noether Program of the German Research Foundation DFG; CNRS; Région Ile de France) and has lead the French team in the European GEMMA project on policymaking, gender and migration in the 7th framework program of the European Union at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris. As an ERC grantee with a deep experience in international project leading, Professor Salzbrunn was nominated member of the Social and Human Sciences Support Group of Horizon 2020 - European Union, by the State Secretary for Research and Innovation.

Raphaela von Weichs is a social and cultural anthropologist at the University of Lausanne, ‘Institut de sciences sociales des religions’ (ISSR), Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies. She is senior researcher in the ERC project “ARTIVISM – Art and Activism: Creativity and Performance as subversive forms of political expression” (Principal Investigator Prof. Dr. Monika Salzbrunn, 2016-2021). Within ARTIVISM, she conducts research on art and activism in Africa, with a focus on cartoon and comic art in Cameroon, as well as on France as a transnational space of Cameroonian migration.

She holds a PhD in African Studies from the University of Cologne and has been trained in Anthropology and African Studies at the University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the Free University of Berlin, and the University of Freiburg. Her main fields of research and teachings are in Political Anthropology, the Anthropology of Religion, of Migration, and of Music and more recently in the Anthropology of Art, Graphic Anthropology and Sensory Anthropology. She taught social and cultural anthropology at the Universities of Cologne, Bochum, Münster and the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf, the Universities of Neuchâtel and of Lausanne.

Federica is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Lausanne (Switzerland). She is involved in the ERC-ARTIVISM project since December 2016. She holds a B.A. in Cross-cultural Communication with a specialization in Sociology of Migrations from the Università degli Studi di Torino (IT), as well as a M.Sc. in Social and Cultural Anthropology with a specialization in Migrations, Minorities and Multiculturalism from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (BE). 

During her B.A., she was an exchange student at the Universität Bremen (DE) in the framework of the Erasmus project. Before enrolling in her PhD at the University of Lausanne, she worked at the ITAL-Uil Suisse headquarter in Bienne within the governmental-funded project “Old and New Italian Migrations”, where she provided assistance to the Italian community of the Geneva and Bern Cantons, and carried out a research on the cognitive-normative tensions driving the discourses of the Italians living in Switzerland. This research was presented at an international conference in Santiago de Compostela (ES).

Federica’s academic works focus on migration-related phenomena. In her M.Sc. thesis “Broken Dreams of a Dream Country. Italy Between Wishes and Disenchantments” directed by Prof. Dr. Salazar (KU Leuven) and Dr. Elliot (University of Bristol), she explored the mobility of young Italians adopting the imaginaries’ theoretical perspective, that allowed a broader understanding of the dynamics triggering the motion of people. She presented her thesis in an international conference in Turin (IT), and part of it was published in scientific and international journals.

Sara Wiederkehr is an Anthropologist graduated from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She holds a joint MA in Contemporary History from the Universidad de Zaragoza and the Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, and a MA in Media and Visual Anthropology from the Freie Universität Berlin.

Her research interest focuses on the construction of social memories, the relation between humans and their lived and built environments and the use and role of visual images in war and social conflicts. She is also interested in exploring visual narratives by combining ethnographic theories and methodologies with visual anthropology.

Her research interest focuses on the construction of social memories, the relation between humans and their lived and built environments and the use and role of visual images in war and social conflicts. She is also interested in exploring visual narratives by combining ethnographic theories and methodologies with visual anthropology.

Currently, she is doing her PhD research as part of the ERC Artivism project: “Art and Activism. Creativity and Performance as Subversive Form of Political Expression in Super- Diverse Cities”, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Monika Salzbrunn, at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. She focuses on the relation between Street Art, the urban space, and social imaginaries.

I am the secretary of the project ARTIVISM, as of September 1st 2020

I’ve been working at the University of Lausanne since January 2012, in charge of the administrative aspects for various European grants (H2020, Marie Curie, FP7) and Swiss National Funds. My job is to help the core team with travels, reimbursements, contracts, conferences and seminars.

I grew up and studied between Lausanne, Geneva and the Alps area. I have professional experiences in several domains, such as hotels, watches, tourism offices, outplacement, building and medical devices. Being able to help promoting research in Switzerland is very important for me.

I am very interested in Art, Nature and local “slow and green” tourism development. I practice kundalini yoga, ski, running, aquagym and cycling. I love Japan and Japanese food. One of my skills is to be curious and my need to learn at any time.