Are you ready to turn your research results and knowledge into innovative business ideas? Join our workshop on entrepreneurship and innovation which we jointly organise with the Technology Transfer Office of the University of Vienna.

23 and 24 January 2024

Suggest a ViDSS International Workshop! ViDSS International Workshops are initiated by students and provide methodological training and international networking opportunities for doctoral candidates in the social sciences at the University of Vienna.

With the Final Year Fund, the ViDSS supports doctoral candidates during the final year of the doctoral studies. ViDSS students can apply for a maximum amount of € 750 for proofreading and printing costs or expenses related to self-organised workshops or conference participation.

We warmly welcome our new sowi:docs Fellows! Ariadne Sevgi Avkıran (science and technology studies) will investigate the expectations of neural machine translation, Aleksandra Maria Fila (development studies) creativity in the Polish neoliberal transformation and Felix Lene Ihrig (sociology) healthcare for genderqueer people in Austria.

(by Katja Mayer and Carsten Horn)

In our blogpost we delve into the complexities of the in/visibilities of inequalities in the global digital transformation. In particular, we explore the theme inspired by Noopur Raval’s thought-provoking commentary on the notion of “ghost work.” Raval’s commentary challenges the discourse surrounding the invisibility of workers from the Global South ...

Susanna Azevedo, doctoral candidate in sociology, is a member of the DOC team working on “Explicit and Implicit Rules of Competition”. Carmen Elsayad, doctoral candidate in development studies, is part of the second DOC team project that the ÖAW funded this year, namely “Understanding the Global Value Chain for Coffee from an Intersectional Perspective”. Congratulations!

The Nachwuchsnetzwerk Politische Kommunikation awarded the PolKom-Kickstarter-Fund 2023 to communication scientist Selina Noetzel for her research project on political microtargeting. The funding will be used for recruiting a heterogeneous group of research participants in a follow-up study. Congratulations!

Content moderators bear the responsibility of upholding a civil discourse environment within digital platforms. A study conducted by Andrea Stockinger together with Svenja Schäfer and Sophie Lecheler explores the methods content moderators employ to achieve this goal and assesses the involvement of AI-based technological tools in their efforts.

(by Ekaterina Zhelenkova)

The importance of education on the trajectories of human life can hardly be underestimated, although its footprints are not always clear at first sight. It is no easy task to capture all the benefits it offers nor to give due appreciation to the formidable extent to which those benefits go and how they shape the wider ...

Arne Langlet was recently added to the IUCN High Seas Specialist Group. The Group works on building capacity and knowledge, as well as supporting new technologies, for identifying, establishing, managing and monitoring marine protected area networks and wider systems of area-based management tools in the 64% of the ocean beyond national boundaries.

Timo Aava, Sophie Minihold and Rasmus Wardemann discuss the thrills and troubles of academic writing and the benefits of peer exchange and support during this – supposedly – lonely task. Learn about the painful step of deleting text and what to do when things just don’t seem to go right at all.

(by Isabella M. Radhuber, Wanda Spahl and Katharina Kieslich)

“I find the discussion of this crisis very intriguing, because it affects so many areas of life, yes? Because everything has to be maneuvered politically, because so many areas of life are affected.” These words of a young woman anticipated the full extent of the crisis ...