Supervisors in the ViDSS

Members of the ViDSS are top researchers in the social sciences. They promote the scientific development of the doctoral candidate to become an independent researcher.

Department of Communication

• Florian Arendt
  Health communication
• Hajo Boomgaarden
  Media effects on political cognition, attitudes and behaviour | advancements in content analysis techniques | media, immigration and populist, extreme right parties | european integration – public opinion and media coverage
• Tobias Dienlin
  Privacy | well-being | social media | media effects | experimental designs | longitudinal designs | structural equation modeling | open science
• Sabine Einwiller
  Public relations | strategic communication | crisis & conflict management
• Gerit Götzenbrucker
  Critical technology and media analysis: impacts of new information and communication technologies | social network analysis | digital game studies
• Rainer Gries
  Franz Vranitzky Chair for European Studies
• Folker Hanusch
  Comparative journalism studies | journalism culture | lifestyle journalism | indigenous journalism | journalism and memory
• Friedrich Hausjell
  History of media and communication | journalism research | media and communication politics | migration, diversity and the media | disability and the media | public broadcasting | media competence
• Petra Herczeg
  Children in our communications society | cross-cultural communication
• Kathrin Karsay
  Entertainment research | media effects | mobile media & social media | digital well-being
• Sophie Lecheler
  Political communication | political journalism | digitalisation and political media | news processing | emotions in news and politics | experimental research
• Jörg Matthes
  Advertising | content studies | media content | reception & effects | research methods
• Desiree Schmuck
  The use and effects of digital media in childhood and adolescence | political engagement in digital environments | media change and (intergroup) relations | self-determined interactions with media innovations
• Katharine Sarikakis
  Media governance and organisation | European media and cultural policies and European integration | international communication | gender and feminist epistemology in communication and cultural policy and international communications
• Annie Waldherr
  Computational social science | public sphere | social media | political participation | science & technology discourses
• Claudia Wilhelm
  Gender and media | intersectionality | children, adolescents and media | reception and effects | social media | digital deviance
• Julia Wippersberg
  Strategic communication | media competence

Department of Demography

• Eva Beaujouan
  Fertility and family | demographic change | unions and births over the life-course | quantitative methods | level of education & gender | international comparisons
• Marc Luy
  Health and longevity | differentials in morbidity and mortality | healthy ageing | demography of Europe | demographic methods | indirect estimation techniques | quasi-experimental settings
• Erich Striessnig
  Demography and sustainable development | population projections | spatial demography | demographic methods | demographic transition

Department of Development Studies

• Antje Daniel
  Development studies| socio-ecological crisis and transformation | social movements studies | future and utopia | gender | youth | democracy | peace and conflict studies | decolonisation
• Petra Dannecker
  Development sociology and development politics | globalization and migration processes | islamization processes in South and Southeast Asia | gender studies, international gender politics, and gender and migration | methodologies and qualitative methods | science-policy nexus | area expertise on Asia | transnationalization and development
• Eva-Maria Muschik
  History of development | international organisations | humanitarianism | decolonisation
• Cornelia Staritz
  Development economics | international trade and trade policy | global value chain and production networks | commodity-based development | financialization and commodities

Department of Nursing Science

• Kerstin Hämel
  Primary health care | long-term care | international comparative studies | patient and community participation | advanced practice nursing | interprofessional collaboration | working environments in nursing
• Katharina Heimerl
  Palliative care | palliative geriatrics | caring community, dementia friendly community | participatory research
• Hannah Mayer
  Gerontological care | person-centered care | theory development in nursing | research methodology and research ethics
• Martin Nagl-Cupal
  Family centered care | home care | pediadric care | living with chronical illness
• Sabine Pleschberger
  The profession of nursing – policy & ethics | end-of-life care | care for older people | user perspective in health care | non-kin caregivers
• Elisabeth Reitinger
  Palliative care for the elderly | dementia care | care ethics | gender and care

Department of Political Science

• Dorothee Bohle
  Comparative Political Economy (varieties of capitalism, institutional political economy, welfare states & industrial relations, financialization) with a specific focus on East Central Europe
  
• Ulrich Brand
  Historical-materialistic analyses of state, democracy and globalisation | historical-materialistic policy analysis | ecological crisis and global environmental governance | regional focus on Latin America | the role of knowledge in international politics
• Laurenz Ennser-Jedenastik
  Welfare states | parties and party competition | political elites | patronage and politicization in the public sector
• Gerda Falkner
  European Union policies in the fields of digitalisation, welfare, working conditions, equality, and democracy
• Dorit Geva
  Politics and gender | rightwing politics | neoliberalism | political sociology | historical sociology | political ethnography
• Sylvia Kritzinger
  Political behaviour | electoral research | democratic representation | europeanisation of party politics | quantitative methods
• Karin Liebhart
  Visual political communication | visual and discursive representations of politics | political cultures and popular cultures | rightwing populism and rightwing extremism | memory politics
• Oliver Marchart
  Political theory | social theory | theories of democracy | history of political ideas | social movement research | political discourse analysis
• Thomas Meyer
  Political institutions of representative democracies | political competition | political communication | coalition politics
• Patrick Müller
  European studies | global governance and international institutions | European foreign and
  security policy | conflict resolution | Middle East
• Wolfgang Claudius Müller
  Coalition politics and governance | party competition | political elite behaviour | Europeanising and legislation | comparative government and politics, with a special interest for Austrian politics, and political economy
• Katharina Theresa Paul
  Interpretive policy analysis | public health policy | (digital) health governance | politics of knowledge and ignorance
• Carolina Plescia
  Voting behavior | electoral systems | digital democracy | public opinion | political psychology
• Barbara Prainsack
  Health policy | practices, institutions and politics of solidarity | political, social and ethical aspects of Personalised Medicine | data-rich practices in science and medicine | regulation of DNA technologies in medicine and forensics | comparative science & technology policy
• Birgit Sauer
  Politics of gender relations | governance and gender | theories of state, democracy and institutions | politics and culture and comparative policy research
• Peter Slominski
  European Integration with focus on EU energy policy | the EU’s fight against climate change
• Alice Vadrot
  Global environmental politics | practices, discourses and institutions in international biodiversity politics | institutions interfacing science and policy & global environmental assessments | knowledge and power in international politics | international marine biodiversity politics
• Markus Wagner
  Issues and ideologies in party competition and vote choice | British politics
• Fabio Wolkenstein
  Democratic theory | political representation | political ideologies (esp. Social democracy, conservatism and Christian democracy) | theories of partisanship and activism | constitutional theory
• Christopher Wratil
  Political representation and behaviour | European Union politics | public opinion | populism | advanced quantitative methods

Department of Science and Technology Studies

• Sarah Davies
  Critical studies of science communication, public engagement with science, and amateur science | public interactions with digitised science and technology | the contemporary conditions of academic work and knowledge production | digitisation within scientific knowledge production
• Ulrike Felt
  Questions of the development and interaction of different forms of knowledge, research communication as well as participation and governance in technoscience | the importance of time/temporality in technoscientific constellations | topics relating to the politics of knowledge, focusing on changes of research cultures as well as institutional reforms, questions of quality assurance mechanisms, etc.
• Maximilian Fochler
  Changing cultures and practices of academic knowledge production | entanglements of academic knowledge production with other societal logics (particularly the economy) | societal responsibility of science | institutional change in the organization and communication of science | participation of publics in knowledge production processes
• Nina Klimburg-Witjes
  Infrastructures and global politics | technology, innovation and security | social studies of outer space and imagined futures of Earth-Space relations | science, technology and international relations | fieldwork in contexts of secrecy
• Fredy Mora Gámez
  Technoscience and social movements | knowledge and expertise within migration and border policies | technoscience, material politics, and everyday life | digital activisms | social studies of border control and surveillance technologies | critical studies of population data infrastructures | feminist technoscience studies | decoloniality and STS | ethnography and digital methods | knowledge, technology and human rights | sociomaterial understandings of reparation and remembrance

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology

• Judith Bovensiepen
  Social, political and environmental anthropology | animism, Catholicism and religious transformations | cosmology and social change | violence, conflict and post-conflict recovery | kinship and house-based societies | anthropology of place and landscape | anthropology of oil and natural resource extraction | Southeast Asia and the Pacific
• Ayse Caglar
  Globalisation and transnationalisation processes | transformations of nation states and the changing property relations | migration | urban restructuring and migrants | cultural industries | transnational legal spaces | citizenship | ethnographies of the state | Roma in Europe | family law | European cultural policies, immigrant cultural production and cultural industries | nationalism and nationalist discourses | theories of ideology, popular and consumer culture
• Marie-France Chevron
  Theory, epistemology of social and cultural anthropology | history of German-speaking and French Ethnology/Anthropology (19th–20th century) | theories of social and cultural transformation | digitalisation | theory in urban anthropology – development of urban areas in Africa and Europe
• Manuela Ciotti
  Identity politics | art world | politics of materiality | modernity | political agency | gender and politics | Dalit communities | postcolonial studies | social media | digital anthropology | politics of representation | Global South | India and South Asia
• Sabine Grenz
  Qualitative empirical methodology | gender methodology and epistemology | gender, diversity and intersectionality | gender, secularism and religion | gender and sexuality/sexualities (especially in connection with commercial sexuality) | historical perspectives on gender constructions | institutionalisation and history of gender studies
• Janina Kehr
  Political anthropology of health and illness | global infectious diseases, biopolitics and planetary health | hospital spaces and places | healthcare and the economy | biomedicalization, pharmaceutical consumption and the environment
• Wolfgang Kraus
  Social and cultural anthropology of North Africa and the Middle East | ethnolinguistic identity and current political developments in Morocco | tribal societies – identity and socio-political forms | memory and historical awareness
• Peter Schweitzer
  Anthropology of climate change | indigenous movements | cultures and identities | mobilities (of people and ideas) | postsocialisms | social-ecological systems | history of science
• Tatjana Thelen
  Kinship and political anthropology (including gender and generation, citizenship and ethnography of the state, Roma) | care and social security | post-socialist transformations (with special emphasis on Hungary, Romania, eastern Germany) | relational theory and social networks
• Sanderien Verstappen
  Visual and multimodal anthropology | (in)visibilities | mobility – migration, transnationalism, displacement | development – urbanization, residential segregation, rural-urban linkages | Global South Asia
• Patricia Zuckerhut
  Feminist anthropology | Post- and Decoloniality | anthropology of sexualized and gendered violence | peasants | household and community | anthropological concepts of personhood | cosmovision | Latin America with focus on Mexico

Department of Sociology

• Caroline Berghammer
  Social stratification research | quantitative methods | family sociology | life course research | international comparative research
• Valeria Bordone
  Age and ageing (population ageing, individual ageing, subjective age, active ageing) | family sociology (intergenerational relationships, grandparent(hood)) | life course research | quantitative methods of social research
• Emma Dowling
  Sociology of social change | emotional and affective labour | social reproduction and welfare state transformation | globalisation and transnational civil society | sociology of financialisation
• Anna Durnová
  Sociology of emotions | cultural sociology | political sociology | resistance | care & well-being | intimacy | interpretive methods | feminist sociology
• Eva Flicker
  Sociology of film, media and communication | visual sociology | group dynamics/teams/organisations | gender research | career paths of academics
• Yuri Kazepov
  International urban sociology (poverty, segregation, governance, local social policy, city regeneration projects, multilevel governance, EU-state-city relations, life situation analysis) | comparative social policy (welfare regimes, social benefits, activations policies, migration, rescaling and regionalising of social policy, citizenship, cross-country comparison, EU and social policy)
• Bernhard Kittel
  Experimental social justice research | experimental committee decision-making and election research | employment and labor market research | international comparative analysis of welfare states and industrial relations
• Franz Kolland
  Social gerontology (education in later life, culture of ageing, lifestyles, use of new technologies) | educational sociology (students’ behaviour and study paths) | sociology of developing countries (tourism)
• Michael Parzer
  Culture | social inequality | migration | interpretative social research
• Michaela Pfadenhauer
  Phenomenologically oriented sociology of knowledge | social constructivism as paradigm of social sciences | cultural change and mediatisation | challenges of social robotics for sociality | life-world analytical ethnography
• Christoph Reinprecht
  Migration studies | social stratification and social inequality | political sociology | theory and methodology of participatory intervention research
• Elisabeth Scheibelhofer
  Migration | mobility | transnational social relations | methodologies and methods of interpretative social research
• Nadia Steiber
  Quantitative methods | social inequality and social mobility | employment and labour market research | population ageing | education sociology | family sociology | life course research | international comparative research
• Ulrike Zartler
  Family sociology | childhood sociology | separation/divorce and their consequences | sociological analysis of family and child laws | qualitative methods in childhood and family research