Members List
Dr. Helena Hof
Visiting Researcher
Helena Hof, PhD, is a Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Asian Migrations (IAM), Waseda University and an alumni of Waseda’s Graduate School of Asia-Pacific Studies. In her doctoral and postdoctoral research at Waseda, she focused on the entanglements of physical mobility, career mobility and social mobility in European migrants’ early-career trajectories in the global cities Tokyo, Singapore and Sao Paulo. Helena’s home institution is the University of Zurich where she is a Senior Research and Teaching Fellow at the Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies. She also holds an affiliation as Research Fellow with the Max-Planck-Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany (MMG-MPG) where she started a new four-year research project in March 2021. She is currently developing a book manuscript based on her dissertation and has additionally taken up the position of book reviews editor at the academic journal Transitions: Journal of Transient Migration.
Research Projects
Tokyo's attractiveness for global talent: a comparative study of Tokyo, Singapore, and Sao Paulo, JSPS Early-Career Scientists award, 2019-2022
This qualitative project examines Japan’s low attractivity for skilled foreign labor in a comparative perspective. As global nodes in the world economy, the three metropoles Tokyo, Singapore, and Sao Paulo, regional headquarters for their respective regions, potentially appeal to so-called ‘global talents’, yet Sao Paulo similar to Tokyo struggles to attract and more so to retain such talent. The theoretical framework of the ‘alternative global city’ offers an original angle to study the challenges and opportunities of incorporating ethnically diverse foreigners into the domestic labor markets and increasingly multicultural city populations and aims to provide Japanese policy makers and firms with recommendations how to retain global talent more successfully.
Foreign Entrepreneurs in Tokyo's and Singapore's knowledge-intensive start-up sector,
German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), 2021-2025
In this joint project, entitled "'Skill' in the Migration Process of Foreign Workers in Asia" and funded by the BMBF, Helena will conduct independent research at the Max Planck Institute, and cooperate in the larger project with Dr. Ruth Achenbach and Dr. Joohyun Justyn Park at the University of Frankfurt, Dr. Aimi Muranaka at the University of Duisburg-Essen, and Dr. Megha Wadhwa at the Free University of Berlin. Helena investigates migrant-led innovation in Tokyo’s and Singapore’s knowledge-intensive start-up sectors and focusses on the link between foreigners’ involvement in local entrepreneurial networks and the development of their business, as well as their overall embedding in the host society. During her fieldwork in Tokyo, Helena will be based at IAM and hopes to gain insights in Tokyo’s start-up ecosystem and to speak to practitioners and policy makers concerned with innovation and entrepreneurship.
Publications
For Helena Hof's publication please fo here