Anne Wihstutz

Anne Wihstutz serves as Professor of Sociology at Berlin Protestant University of Applied Sciences, Germany, bringing expertise as a trained social and youth worker. Her current research collaboration involves the DFG-funded project 'Children and Work - the meaning of work to working children' at Technical University Berlin. Previously, she held academic positions as post-doc lecturer at Martin-Luther University Halle-Wittenberg and lecturer at Freie Universität Berlin teaching the Master's course in Children's Rights and Childhood Studies. She led the 2016-2017 research project examining 'Everyday life of very young children in Refugee Mass Accommodation'.

Her research centers on children's agency and rights within forced migration contexts, with particular emphasis on participatory approaches in refugee accommodations. She investigates how children navigate institutional structures while maintaining autonomy, bridging sociological theory with practical social work applications. Her work critically examines power dynamics in child-adult relationships within displacement settings, focusing on everyday resistance and meaning-making processes among displaced children.

Dr. Wihstutz's scholarly contributions demonstrate consistent engagement with vulnerable child populations through empirical fieldwork in refugee accommodations. Her leadership in the 2016-2017 mass accommodation study established methodological frameworks for researching very young children in crisis settings, while her current DFG collaboration extends this focus to working children's lived experiences across cultural contexts. This trajectory reflects her commitment to amplifying children's voices in migration research through participatory methodologies.