Lisa Marie Borrelli is a Full Professor of Social Work (50%) at the Faculty of Economics, University of Neuchâtel (starting 01.09.2026) and at the University of Applied Sciences Western Switzerland (HES-SO Valais-Wallis). She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Bern and completed her habilitation in Cultural Anthropology at the University of Basel in 2025, where she now functions as Privatdozentin. Her research lies at the intersection of migration studies, socio-legal analysis, social policy, and organizational ethnography, with a particular focus on street-level bureaucracies, welfare state transformations, and practices of bordering and policing.

Her work examines how law, emotions, and institutional practices shape migration governance and social inclusion across Europe and beyond. Empirically, she combines long-term ethnographic fieldwork with comparative and transnational research designs, conducting research in Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, Jordan, Lebanon and other contexts. Thematically, her scholarship addresses migration control, deportation and return, social assistance and integration regimes, humanitarian governance, and the entanglements between social policy and policing.

Her current research projects investigate social work as a form of policing across European welfare states, socio-legal interactions within Swiss invalidity insurance, frontline work in humanitarian crises, and refugee return dynamics across Global North–South contexts.

• Social Work Theories I 
• Social Work Theories II 
• Social Work Research Design: From Ideas to PhD Proposals 
• Qualitative Methods in the Social Sciences 

Most recent publications:

Alberti, C. and Borrelli, L. M. (2025). Disciplining Asylum Seekers through Infrastructure: Everyday-Power Effects Of Enforced Paralysation and Activation in Switzerland. Migration and Society, 8(1):172-187. Doi: 10.3167/arms.2025.080112.

Borrelli, L. M., Johannesson, L. and Lindberg, A. (2025). Predictable patterns of unpredictability: a literature review of discretion in migration control SI Searching the Webs of Discretion. Political Research Exchange, 7(1). Doi : 10.1080/2474736X.2025.2508374.

Borrelli, L. M. and Lindberg, A. (2025). The chains of everyday statecraft. Custodial and material chains of deportation. Etnofoor, Special Issue Chains 37(1): 13-30.

Borrelli, L. M. (2025). Making Migrants Deportable: Transferred Responsibility and Borrowed Legitimacy at the Intersection of Welfare and Migration Policy. Society. Doi: 10.1007/s12115-024-01055-8.