Katharina Winterhalder
PhD Student
Yunus Centre
Katharina is a PhD candidate who joined the Yunus Centre in February 2022. Her research focuses on the lived experiences of forcibly displaced people and explores the ways in which social innovations provide opportunities for them to develop relationships with local stakeholders. She is also interested in the role of forcibly displaced people in social innovations: whether they engage in social innovation in their host societies and, if so, how they do so. Her work draws on participatory and community-based approaches and engaged 14 forcibly displaced people in Germany as community researchers in a Photovoice project. This work is jointly supervised by Professor Stephen Sinclair, Dr Micaela Mazzei, and Dr Gillian Murray.
Katharina holds a Bachelor of Arts in International Social Work from the Protestant University in Ludwigsburg and a master’s degree in Social Business and Microfinance from Glasgow Caledonian University. She has worked in a variety of organisations and sectors in Germany, Tanzania, Kenya, Scotland, and Finland, and is the founder and chair of an NGO supporting education for youth, micro-entrepreneurship for women, and transcultural knowledge exchange between East Africa and Europe.
Prior to her PhD, Katharina also worked both as a case manager and team coordinator in marginalised communities, and as a consultant supporting senior management of social enterprises to balance social and financial aims. Working for a German city council, Katharina gained insights into the lived experiences of forcibly displaced people and the support structures and systems in place surrounding their settlement. Katharina has also worked in the renewable energy sector as a project manager, organising academia-business exchange platforms and managing projects to foster the Green Transition with European and African partners.
She is passionate about unravelling post-colonial structures and power dynamics, exploring different ways of knowing, and creating spaces of solidarity and interdisciplinary collaboration.