Supervisors

Supervision plays a central role in the doctoral programme. Supervisors advise and support doctoral candidates in successfully completing their doctoral project.

A major task of the thesis supervisor is selecting suitable doctoral candidates and providing suitable conditions of supervision, which are documented in the doctoral thesis agreement. The confirmation of the supervision is at the discretion of the supervising academic and is obtained, if an academic research question has been defined, the doctoral candidate is sufficiently qualified and sufficient resources (time, funding, material) are available that appear to make the completion of the doctoral project realistic.

Supervisors in the social sciences who are employed with the University of Vienna (subject to an employment contract of 50 % or more) can join the ViDSS. Participation of supervisors in the ViDSS includes providing active consent to the Code of Good Practice for Doctoral Schools and the willingness to actively participate in the activities organised by the Doctoral School.

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
• Katherine 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
• Christian Swertz
  Epistemology of media education | media education contributions to society | resistant and creative media education practice
• 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

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

Development studies

• 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
• Antje Daniel
  Development studies| socio-ecological crisis and transformation | social movements studies | future and utopia | gender | youth | democracy | peace and conflict studies | decolonisation
• 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

Nursing science

• 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

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
• Dirk Lange
  Civic Consciousness | democratic education | inclusive citizenship education | migration and civic education | civic education research | historical political education
• 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
• Sieglinde Rosenberger
  Inclusion and exclusion in the context of migration | Austrian politics and Europeanisation | political participation | governance and differences
• 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
• Heinz Christoph Steinhardt
  Popular protest | surveillance and privacy | social credit | social trust | civil society | political identities | Chinese-speaking societies | survey research | content analysis
• 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

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

Social and cultural anthropology

• 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