Keynote by Prof. Strohmayer on Crafting Hopeful Imaginaries and Sustainability in Systems Change Work, 4 June 2026
We are pleased to invite you to join this guest lecture, which is part of Cycles of Care, a spring workshop series at the UZH Digital Society Initiative’s Health Community: Cycles of Care.
“Crafting Hopeful Imaginaries and Exploring Sustainability in Systems Change Work: improving care for mothers in recovery from addictions“
📅 Thursday, June 4 2026 – 17.15 – 18.00h
📍 University of Zurich, Digital Society Initiative, Building SOC, Rämistrasse 69 or 💻 Hybrid/Zoom
About the Lecture
In this talk, Dr. Strohmayer will reflect on her community-based and design-led research to improve care ecosystems with mothers in recovery from addiction. She will explore how this programme of work has tried to balance long-term systems change with immediately implementable changes in practice across public health, social care, recovery, and women’s support services. Drawing together findings from this ongoing work, Dr. Strohmayer will use this as an example to reflect on (1) what ‘sustainability’ in systems change work can be when working with communities and (2) how this work can lead to collaborative, cross-sector working to craft hopeful imaginaries of not only the care that is needed for women to survive, but also to blossom.
About Dr. Angelika Strohmayer
Dr. Strohmayer is a challenge-led researcher working in coalitions with practitioners, policy-makers, activists, people with lived experience, and researchers across disciplinary divides to reduce the vulnerabilisation of women facing multiple disadvantage and others in difficult life situations. This approach leads her to working at all levels of the support service landscape, such as: understanding issues, co-designing new services and interventions (including critical engagement with and design of those that are digital and big data/AI- driven), re-imagining opportunities for support, working with statutory bodies, and engaging with commissioners and policymakers locally, regionally, and nationally. In all of this work, she aims to centre and amplify lived experience and frontline staff experience wherever possible often through collaborative craft, making, and creative practice; creating platforms and facilitating alternative formats for sharing experience with the explicit intention of improving services and radically re-imagining systems of care. Much of this work has been place-based, situated in the North East of England, but she has also previously worked in Austria, Romania, Moldova, and Canada, among others.
She does this work alongside colleagues as founder and co-leader of the Design Feminisms Research Group in the school of Design, Arts, and Creative Industries and as co-founder and co-lead of the Gendered Violence and Abuse Interdisciplinary Research Theme (a university-wide research group). Over the years she has also had the absolute privilege of working with multiple research assistants and PhD students, all of whom have worked on topics related to justice-oriented community-based and community-driven research.
About the Workshop Series
Digital women’s health sits at the intersection of medicine, technology, sociology, and intersectionally feminist design. Yet, despite growing evidence of sex- and gender-specific differences, their integration into research design, data analysis, and applied practice remains fragmented, inconsistent, and methodologically underdeveloped.
This workshop series therefore brings together researchers and practitioners across medicine, technology, sociology, and feminist design who work with sex- and gender-specific data focusing on
- how to better (best) integrate such data into research and practice
- sharing evidence and best-case practices and
- identify and closing gaps and biases in data, design, communication, and care
Each workshop session will combine keynote inputs, interactive group work, and open discussion.
Contributions and materials from the sessions will feed into a living document compiling best practices, tools, and resources (e.g., validated questionnaires, datasets, GitHub repositories, R packages, and design principles). The goal is to translate these insights into a joint scholarly publication advancing the field of digital women’s health together with all interested workshop participants.