Isabelle joined the Social Policy Department as an ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ Fellow in 2024. Previously, she submitted her PhD at the University of York, where she also worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant in the School for Business and Society (previously Department of Social Policy and Social Work). Her thesis compares the cases of German and the UK, and explores the framing of apprenticeships in parliamentary debates from 1946 to 2019. To do so, Isabelle used state of the art quantitative methods analysing large amounts of text as data. For her PhD, she was awarded the ESRC +3 studentship by the White Rose Doctoral Training Partnership (Education, Childhood and Youth Pathway), and a departmental scholarship by the Department of Social Policy and Social Work, University of York.
Isabelle holds an MA in Social Policy (hons), awarded by the University of York, for which she received the Maria Bourboulis Scholarship. By the Leuphana University of Lüneburg, she was awarded a BA and MEd (Hons) in Vocational Education in Social Care, and completed a BA (Hons) in Social Work at the University of Applied Science and Arts Hanover. Besides her academic career, Isabelle is a Social Worker with several years of work experience. As such she supported young people in their transitions from school to work.
Combining her academic expertise with her work experience, Isabelle is particularly interested in the political economy of skill formation, the role of policy framing in institutionalisation processes, quantitative text analysis. Her research shifts the focus from formal institutions to the framing of and sociocultural narratives surrounding policies, considered to have grown over decades and centuries.