Dr. Maya Ober

Maya Ober, PhD, is a researcher and lecturer in the Department of Social Anthropology and Cultural Studies at the University of Bern. Her research focuses on feminist practices in universities, with a particular emphasis on design education and design schools. Working at the intersection of feminist theory, institutional studies, and critical design research, she examines universities as affective socio-political spaces in which institutional and epistemic norms—especially claims to neutrality and apoliticality—are produced, negotiated, and contested.

Her work investigates how feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial interventions reshape curricula, pedagogical practices, spatial arrangements, and institutional processes within design education. By foregrounding students’ and educators’ everyday practices, her research highlights how universities function simultaneously as sites of knowledge production, institutional power, and political struggle, and how design education plays a key role in materializing these dynamics beyond the university.