Funding Heidelberg Researcher Tandem Receives State Funding
8 August 2025
Margarete von Wrangell Female Junior Professorship Program: Support for Academic Career Development
With the aim of reliably supporting highly qualified women on their academic career paths, the state of Baden-Württemberg is funding Junior Professor Dr Yaatsil Guevara González and her colleague Zhenwei Wang. The two researchers from Heidelberg University are collaborating on a joint project on the topic of migration at the Heidelberg Center for Ibero-American Studies (HCIAS). The tandem funding is part of the Margarete von Wrangell Female Junior Professorship Program. It enables Prof. Guevara González to further develop her research area by adding a recently graduated postdoctoral researcher to her project for a three-year period. Her tandem partner, Zhenwei Wang, will use this full-time employment opportunity to prepare for a structured postdoc position.
Yaatsil Guevara González has been Junior Professor of Migration and the Americas at Heidelberg University since 2023. She studied Historical Anthropology and Area Studies at the Universidad Veracruzana in Xalapa (Mexico) and completed her doctorate in 2022 at Bielefeld University with a dissertation in ethno-sociology. At HCIAS, her research focuses on forced migration flows across the American continent. The anthropologist and ethnographer is exploring how the collective action of migrants influences the everyday lives of individuals. She also focuses on the emotional and social processes that take place within irregular cross-border mobility.
Her tandem partner, Zhenwei Wang, studied Sociology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong as well as Bielefeld University, where she completed her doctorate in Social Anthropology and Sociology. Her research explores gender and class dynamics in families on the move, with a focus on family relations, caregiving, and support structures in contemporary China. Since April 2025, Zhenwei Wang has been working as a postdoc researcher at HCIAS in Prof. Guevara González’s team.
Together, the two researchers are conducting a project analyzing the digital migration routes of Chinese migrants at the US-Mexico border. They therefore view migration as both a physical and a digital process. Prof. Guevara González and Zhenwei Wang explore how migrants navigate their transnational mobility and immobility – both their journey and their ties to a specific place – using social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, or the Chinese portal Xiaohongshu. They combine diverse research approaches to gain a comprehensive understanding of these social phenomena.
The state’s newly restructured funding program, relaunched in 2023, is named after Margarete von Wrangell, the first female full professor in Germany. With this program, the Ministry of Science, Research and Arts of Baden-Württemberg aims to retain more women in academia during the critical career stage between obtaining a doctorate and achieving a professorship.