The "Team Ethnography"
Dr. Maike Isaac
Maike leads the “Team Ethnography” as a postdoctoral researcher. She received her PhD in 2024 from the Department of Sociology at McGill University in Montréal, Canada. Maike is a passionate ethnographer. She is interested in how (ascribed) identity characteristics affect team dynamics in the workplace.
For her PhD, she conducted ethnographic research on the recruitment and training of men from countries in West Asia and Africa as geriatric nurses in Germany. She investigated how their public image as supposedly hypermasculine and “dangerous” men affects their work experiences, relationships with colleagues and their positions within their teams.
During her PhD, Maike was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, where she was part of an international team of ethnographers researching care work, migration and age(ing). Her research has been funded by the Fonds de Recherche du Québec, the Jean Monnet Centre Montréal and the Waterloo Centre for German Studies at the University of Waterloo, Canada, among others.
Prior to her doctorate, Maike studied International Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (LL.M.) at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder) and Ethnology (B.A.) at the University of Leipzig. From 2016 to 2018, she worked as an Education Specialist for Gender Equity and Sexual Violence Prevention at Harvard University in Cambridge, USA. From 2021 to 2022, she supported the Equal Opportunities Officer at South Westphalia University of Applied Sciences.
Contact: maike.isaac@unibe.ch
Mara Hofer
Mara is a student assistant in the ethnography team of the CoMind Lab at the University of Bern. She studies social anthropology at the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Bern. Mara is interested in the construction of knowledge in expert fields and in legitimation processes in hierarchical systems. In her bachelor's thesis, she examined discourses and practices in the context of decolonization processes in Swiss museums. Mara enjoys working with people and texts. From 2021 to 2025, she was a member of the editorial board of the student newspaper at the University of Bern. In 2024 she completed an internship in local journalism at the online medium “Hauptstadt”. From 2022 to 2024, she was a board member of the Student Union of the University of Bern (SUB).
Contact: mara.hofer@unibe.ch
Simone Däppen
Simone is studying for a Master's degree in psychology with a focus on clinical psychology and psychotherapy at the University of Bern. As a qualified nurse FH, she has many years of professional experience in various specialist areas and institutions. In her Bachelor's thesis, she investigated the “Influence of action-regulation-based online interventions on professional self-confidence”. She completed her 1-year Master's psychology internship at the Bern University Counseling Center of the Department of Education and Culture. As a nurse with her own work and team experience, she finds it exciting to ethnographically examine team processes in emergency medicine. In addition, working in the ethnography team offers her the opportunity to gain in-depth insights into research. She is therefore delighted to be writing her Master's thesis as part of this project and to be able to explore qualitative research methods in depth, both theoretically and practically.
Contact: simone.daeppen@students.unibe.ch
Danaé Alexander
After completing her bachelor's degree in social sciences, Danaé is currently studying for a master's degree in sociology at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Bern. Danaé is interested in qualitative research methods and their application to research on various sociological questions. In particular, Danaé is interested in the sociology of work and in researching inequalities that manifest themselves both in the construction of professions and in everyday working life itself. In her Bachelor's thesis, she investigated the question of why women in Switzerland continue to work after the reference age. Alongside her studies, Danaé worked as an assistant at the Department of Social Sciences and the Institute of Sociology at the University of Bern. As a student assistant, Danaé supports the CoMind Lab's ethnography team with data management and data analysis.
Contact: danae.alexander@students.unibe.ch