At the Institute of Geography and Sustainability, Silvia was a teaching and research assistant from January 2016 to March 2021 and is now completing her PhD thesis (Supervisor: Anne-Christine Trémon, Co-supervisor: David Picard) "Relating Afrodiasporic Identities in Germany: Life-stories of Millennial Women". The thesis analyses the importance of travel for constructing diasporic identities and for making kinship using an ethnographic approach and by following the lives of five women. In the research group "Cultures and Natures of tourism" she assisted the classes "Anthropologie of Travel and Tourism" , "Heritage, innovation and terroir" and "Field trip" in the frame of the Tourism studies Master programme.
Before the PhD Silvia studied social and cultural anthropology and environmental management in Vienna (Austria) and Córdoba (Spain) with fieldwork in Mexico. In Mexico she did ethnographic fieldwork in a biosphere reserve (Yucatàn, Calakmul) and was interested in the gendered division of labour in indigenous Maya households and the tension between traditional agriculture and globalisation. After her Masters she worked as a trainee at the Austrian institute of sustainable development (OIN). After that, she joined the Medical University of Vienna, Department for Ethnomedicine and International Health as a project and research assistant. She worked in a project on international migration of health-workers in sub-Saharan African countries (with partners in Uganda, Mali, Botswana, Sudan and South Africa) and global care network.
