Susanne Elsen studied Social Work and Social Education, Sociology and Economics and graduated at the University of Trier, Germany. She obtained her PhD (community economy) at the same University and received the Habilitation at the Technical University of Dresden, Germany.

After seven years of fieldwork in a program for the development of sustainable tourism in different countries (Studienkreis für Tourismus and Touristik Union International), she worked at the University of Trier as a researcher and project leader in the field of community-based research and socio-economic development for urban restoration in a disadvantaged area. For her work in this project, she gained the award of the German Schader-Foundation for research in the sector of housing and urban development.

Since 1992, she was responsible for qualification programs of street- and community-workers as well as collaborators for endogenous rural development strategies at the study center of the German protestant church Burckhardthaus, Gelnhausen.

In 1995, she became the director of the research and development project EUROSOZIAL at the University of Trier, financed by the German Ministry for Research and Education (BMBF), focused on local labor market and community-based health-promotion in the European boarder-region SAAR-LOR-LUX, strongly effected by unemployment and poverty in that phase.  

In a parallel contract, she worked as scientific collaborator in the national program Neue Wege der Arbeitsplatzbeschaffung / New ways of generating labor (1998-2003), financed by the German Ministry for Families, Elderly, Women and Youth. This project aimed to create employment options for women in remote rural areas of eastern Germany based on community-development methods.

Since 1997, she has been Professor for Community Development at the University of Applied sciences of Zürich and since 1999 at the University of Applied Sciences, Munich. Since 2010, she is full professor for social science at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano teaching in the trilingual courses on BA-, MA- and PhD-level. She has been the vice-dean for research and the coordinator of four cycles of the PhD program in humanities and social sciences. Since 2021, she is member of WP1 (economic sustainability) of the international ASTRA-PhD-program Applying Sustainability Transition Research Methods in Social Work (HORIZON 2020).

Her emphasis in research, teaching and development lies in social innovation, eco-social transformation and social and solidarity economy with a special focus on solutions for disadvantaged rural and urban areas. She combines participatory research strategies as cooperative and transdisciplinary knowledge production with approaches to sustainable social change and development, involving stakeholders and concerned people.

Language skills:

German mother tongue; English C1; Italian C1; French A2; Spanish A2