Francesca Barp

Francesca is a doctoral candidate at the University of Bern and is a member of the research group on sociology of law of the Hamburg Institute of Social Research. 

In her doctoral project she investigates how migrant domestic workers mobilise the law as part of their repertoire, how they understand and strategically deploy legal frameworks, and how law simultaneously produces and mitigates their precarity. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork conducted in Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York, including interviews with domestic workers, organisers, lawyers, and advocates, her dissertation analyses when and how the law is mobilised. The project examines both formal legal strategies (litigation, legislative advocacy) and less visible forms of legal activism such as rights education, issuing model contracts, and formalisation strategies (in the run-up to legal participation). Francesca is interested in questions of the emancipatory potential of the law, access to law, law and political economy, and conceptions of informality. 

She holds a B.A. in political science and communication studies from the TU Dresden and a M.A. in sociology and political science from the University of Lucerne. She was a visiting researcher at Instituto de Investigaciones Jurídicas y Sociales 'Ambrosio L. Gioja' at Universidad de Buenos Aires in 2025 and a researcher at the University of Potsdam, the University of Dresden as well as the Expert Council on Integration and Migration in Berlin.