About

Dr. Sascha Facius

I’ve always been drawn to places where people try to make sense of complexity, cities, hospitals, classrooms, field missions, streets, and living rooms.

My work moves somewhere between urban sociology, health promotion, and social justice, but what ties it all together is a simple practice: listening.

I started out as a nurse in Berlin, learning that care is not only a technical skill but a way of seeing others. Later, as a social worker, I coordinated programs for young people who had lost their footing, helping them find new professional directions. Those experiences taught me that support is not about fixing people’s lives, but about creating spaces where dignity can grow.

Over time, I became more curious about how whole communities organize around vulnerability, and how social systems amplify or reduce it. That curiosity took me from Cologne’s HIV prevention networks to fieldwork in San Francisco, Manila, São Paulo, Istanbul, and Chicago, cities that each taught me something different about resilience and inequality.

As a researcher, I’ve tried to connect what I saw in practice with broader patterns: how power, poverty, and belonging are built into the very structure of urban life. My academic years deepened those questions, but it was my work with Médecins Sans Frontières that reminded me why I started in the first place, to stand alongside people navigating systems much larger than themselves, from Afghanistan to Tajikistan, Nigeria, or South Sudan.

Now based in Amsterdam, I keep exploring how research and practice can inform each other, how to translate empathy into policy, and policy back into care. I’m part of several international sociological networks that continue to shape my thinking, but what still drives me is what first brought me into nursing: the belief that social change begins in the small gestures of connection between people.