Biography
Kathrin’s research focuses on migration, humanitarian action and international development. She is based at the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology (ISCA) at the University of Oxford.
Her doctoral thesis on migration decision-making in Nepal compared different population groups' access to migration channels. The project was mainly concerned with labour broker networks and the intersectional mechanisms related to class, caste and gender.
Before joining ISCA and COMPAS, Kathrin conducted ethnographic fieldwork on health decision-making in post-disaster Nepal and political participation, decentralisation and pasture-management projects in Kyrgyzstan.
Her work has won several awards and prizes, including the ‘Sutasoma Award’ (Royal Anthropological Institute), the BNAC Dissertation Prize (Britain-Nepal Academic Council, runner-up) and the ‘Sustainability Award for Theses’ (University of Tübingen, Germany).
Besides her academic work, she is a member of ‘FAST’, an emergency response team of the German aid and welfare organisation Arbeiter-Samariter-Bund. Previous deployments include water purification and capacity-building missions to Haiti (2016, 2017) and camp management at the Ukraine-Slovakia border (2022). In 2024, she was Deputy Coordinator in the World Health Organization’s Emergency Medical Team Coordination Cell (EMTCC), Cairo/Gaza.
Research focus:
- Migration and mobility
- Intermediaries and brokering
- Social determinants of health
- Care and kinship
- Civil society participation in humanitarian and development contexts
Selected publications
Fischer, K. (2023) 'Care Functions within the Kinship Network: Explaining Care Arrangements and Female Health Choices in Post-Disaster Nepal', The Journal of Development Studies, 59:4, 552-569. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220388.2022.2147828
Fischer, K. (2022) "Fluctuating 'Structures' of Protection: The Integration of Civil Society Actors in Government-Led Response at the Ukraine-Slovakian Border", MoLab Inventory of Mobilities and Socioeconomic Changes. Department ‘Anthropology of Economic Experimentation’. Halle/Saale: Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. https://doi.org/10.48509/MOLAB.6852