As a professor at the Institute of Social Anthropology, Sabine Strasser teaches and conducts research on migration and border regimes as well as feminist issues – topics that were still uncharted territory at the beginning of her academic career in the 1980s. At the time, she wrote her dissertation on obsession as a counter-hegemonic strategy of women in Turkey. This paper was dismissed by her supervisor as “boring” and thus rejected. Later, it was evaluated as excellent without any changes in content and published by two publishing companies. “This shows how powerful men fear the rise of feminism in universities,” says Strasser.

She was not discouraged by setbacks and resistance: “On the contrary, they motivated me to continue my research, to help shape social anthropology and to strengthen a feminist perspective in the promotion of early career researchers.”