Team

Dr. Florian Elliker, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, is currently leading an ethnographic research project in which the transformation of South African student residences is analyzed. He specializes in working with interviews, participant observation, discourse analysis and discourse ethnography. In his current research, he focusses on minorities, cultural precarity, socialization in higher education, the material architecture and cultural infrastructure of reinventive institutions and most recently on consciousness-altering substances. His past research includes work on populism and discourses on immigration in Switzerland. His research had led him to take on the position of Research Fellow both at the University of the Free State and Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Florian Elliker studied management and economics and worked as management consultant before starting to do sociological research. He specializes in teaching sociology to students of management, economics, law and international affairs.

He is currently heading the interdisciplinary Swiss Network for Qualitative Research, the Research Network 20 “Qualitative Methods” of the European Sociological Association and the Research Committee “Interpretive Sociologies” of the Swiss Sociological Association.

Dr. Niklaus Reichle has been involved in research projects in Vienna, South Africa and Switzerland. He is currently lecturer at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland) and the Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences (Switzerland) as well as research associate in a project on student residences in South Africa. His current focus is on minorities, institutions in higher education, urban development/architecture and the history of sociology. Reichle primarily conducts research using qualitative methods and has solid experience in participant observation, conducting interviews and archive work. Over the last years he has been involved in the production of documentaries/feature films and co-runs a record label.