VDS of Social Sciences
The Vienna Doctoral School of Social Sciences / ViDSS promotes innovative, excellent, problem-oriented doctoral research that aspires to contribute to societal debates and address key global challenges. The cohorts trained and supported by ViDSS are embedded in a vibrant research environment with strong international networks. ViDSS connects a wide spectrum of disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and transdisciplinary perspectives and embraces the full range of epistemological, methodological, and theoretical approaches pursued at the Faculty of Social Sciences. Doctoral candidates receive research training and write theses in the fields of communication, demography, development studies, nursing science, political science, science and technology studies, social and cultural anthropology, and sociology. Committed to the highest standards of doctoral education and close, attentive supervision, ViDSS equips candidates to master key debates, theories, and methods in the social sciences. As a result, its graduates are highly employable within and beyond academia.
Application language: Applications to this doctoral school must be submitted in English.
Update: The application deadline was 2 March, 14:00 CET.
You can still access your submitted application via the Application Portal.
Please do not inquire about the status of your application. All candidates will be informed of the outcome of the selection process as soon as possible.
Supervisor / Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
My research lies at the intersection between political economy and economic sociology and focuses on institutional change, discourse and ideas, and the political constitution of the economy. Empirically, I am interesting in climate-vulnerable industries and regional economies, neoliberal economic ideas, and far-right populism.
Weblink for further information: https://soc.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/valentina-ausserladscheider/
Email: valentina.ausserladscheider(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
I am a demographer and my research focuses on fertility and family changes among women and men in high-income countries, particularly the shift towards later fertility.
Supervision areas: fertility (trends and contextual factors), determinants of childbearing, reproduction (with a demographic perspective).
Weblink for further information: https://biclate.univie.ac.at/
Email: eva.beaujouan(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
My research centers around the use of advanced statistical models and computational analysis to study political communication phenomena, ranging from formal political communication and election campaigns to issues of migration, climate change and European integration. Substantially I am interested in the role of social media platforms and traditional media in shaping how people encounter, process and are affected politically by media in contemporary media environments. To that end we use and critically reflect on various computational approaches, such NLP/ text-as-data/ computational content analysis methods, social network approaches, and simulations, including ABMs, as well as genAI-based methodologies. Additionally, I work on the role of modalities in shaping the processing and effects of mediated communication.
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
Possible themes include both substantial research on media and politics in the broadest sense, as well as developments of and critical reflection on innovative computational methods approaches.
Weblink for further information: www.hajoboomgaarden.com
Email: hajo.boomgaarden(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Ageing, intergenerational relationships, family, well-being, life course, attitudes to climate change.
The project to be supervised should use quantitative methods.
Weblink for further information: https://www.soz.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/personalverzeichnis/detailansicht-personalverzeichnis/user/valeriab19/inum/1125/backpid/83313/
Email: valeria.bordone(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
I work at the intersection of political economy, comparative politics, and political behavior. Substantively, my research examines how structural economic transformations (deindustrialization, globalization, technological change, and the green transition) generate distributional effects and shape political outcomes, as well as how governments design inclusive and sustainable public policies.
I am interested in supervising students working in these areas, and more broadly on projects related to social policy, fiscal policy, environmental policy, technological change, the green transition, and different growth models. For more information on my research, see: https://retobuergisser.com/
Weblink for further information: https://staatswissenschaft.univie.ac.at/en/about-us/scientific-staff/reto-buergisser/
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
I am the leader of the team Sedimented Visions that brings together the study of visual cultures, political life, and material worlds. I welcome ethnography-driven PhD projects that explore the nexus across these dimensions of social life as well as those investigating ideas and practices around the future, both in the global south and north. As a result of my ERC Advanced Grant ANTHROFUTURE, I am also keen to supervise projects on the art world.
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
Art world, future, inequality and social justice, modernity, political agency, gender and politics, global cultural economy, digital media, digital ethnography, multimodality, South Asia, Middle East, Global South
Weblink for further information: https://ksa.univie.ac.at/en/department/people/professorinnen/ciotti-manuela/
Email: manuela.ciotti(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Development Studies, 'North-South' Relations and Global Inequality, Migration (and Development), Development Policy, Postcolonial Studies, Youth and Social Movements, Gender Relations and Intersectionality, Qualitative Methodologies and Methods
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
Migration and Gender Relations, Youth and Social Movements, Antifeminist Movements and Masculinities
Weblink for further information: https://ie.univie.ac.at/en/department/staff/scientific-staff/petra-dannecker/
Email: petra.dannecker(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Digital cultures and practices
Knowledge production, contestation, and dissemination
Data work
Reflexivity and autoethnography
AI and society
(Academic) writing as knowledge practice
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
I supervise research that studies the digital as material practice in contexts where knowledge is created, disseminated, and/or contested. My team therefore takes a Science and Technology Studies approach to understanding the relations between the digital and the epistemic, in contexts that range from online activism to the maintenance and care work involved in research infrastructure such as public biodatabases.
Weblink for further information: https://sts.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/wissenschaftliche-mitarbeiterinnen/staff/sarah-davies/user/daviess4/inum/1129/backpid/203353/
Email: sarah.davies(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Social Reproduction
Health and Social Care
Feminist Political Economy
Social Movements
Eco-Social Transformation
Sociologies of Work
Weblink for further information: https://www.soz.univie.ac.at/en/research/research-teams/team-dowling/
Email: emma.dowling(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Political sociology with a thematic focus on emotions, democracy, and contemporary societal transformations
candidates who will explore:
- how emotions shape political and social processes
- how institutional structures respond to emotional demands
- how vulnerability, belonging, and recognition become entangled with governance and instituions.
Candidates working with me investigate emotions as structuring forces that influence how people experience crises, how institutions justify decisions, and how societies negotiate legitimacy, cohesion, and conflict. I am interested in guiding research that traces the blurring of boundaries between private experience and public/political expectations; whether in debates on polarization, climate anxiety, loneliness, or social isolation. Projects should be theoretically grounded and empirically attentive to how emotions are embedded in participation, identity formation, and visions of social order.
The empirical focus may be national or comparative.
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
Applicants should be interested in the political sociology of emotions and in examining how emotional life intersects with democratic practices, belonging, and institutional responses to crises.
Potential doctoral projects may address:
- how emotions shape political participation, withdrawal, and trust in institutions
- emotional narratives of climate anxiety, insecurity, or care, and their impact on democratic expectations
- loneliness, vulnerability, fear, or anger as social and political force
- practices through which emotions are made visible, silenced, or delegitimized in public discourse
- how emotional vocabularies contribute to the construction of collective identities and boundaries
- affective dynamics in struggles over recognition, well-being, or autonomy
- the role of emotions in reconfiguring what counts as a political issue, actor, or responsibility
The empirical focus may be local, national, or comparative. Projects using interpretive methods, and motivated by empirical curiosity and theoretical innovation, are particularly welcome. Mixed Methods are also possible.
Weblink for further information: https://www.soz.univie.ac.at/en/research/research-teams/team-durnova/
Email: anna.durnova(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Strategic communication of organizations, particularly multinational enterprises (MNEs), with their internal and external stakeholders
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
Corporate sustainability communication of multinational enterprises in regions with differing regulatory and stakeholder demands; Corporate communication on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in times of diverging stakeholder expectations; Fostering inclusion and psychological safety in organizations through employee communication
Weblink for further information: https://ccom.univie.ac.at/
Email: sabine.einwiller(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
political parties, political elites, political institutions, welfare states, Austria
Weblink for further information: https://staatswissenschaft.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/wissenschaftliches-personal/laurenz-ennser-jedenastik/
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Ethics of public communication (media ethics) | pragmatism (and social sciences) | ethics of technology/digital ethics | normative aspects of social theories | political ethics/practical social philosophy | (empirical) social sciences and ethics | basic questions of Christian social ethics
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
I am particularly looking for doctoral candidates in the field of society and AI, especially those interested in how AI transformations affect issues of justice.
Weblink for further information: https://se-ktf.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/team/alexander-filipovic/
Email: alexander.filipovic(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
I work in Science and Technology Studies, on cultures of knowledge production in academia and other societal spaces. My research work revolves around the question how researchers, research communities and research institutions orient themselves and their work in the environmental, political and social polycrisis we are facing today. I am interested in how these actors define the purpose, aims and values underlying their practices, and how this translates to how they produce knowledge. This involves asking how researchers and research communities reflect the relevance of their work, and how this meets support or frictions in their institutional environment. It also comprises to understand how research institutions, and universities in particular, define their role in society and how this relates to the way they structure the spaces their researchers work in.
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
I am interested to supervise doctoral project that engage with the contemporary cultures of knowledge production. These can be on the level of individual scientists and their careers, on the level of research communities or with a focus on institutions of knowledge production such as universities. Relevant topics can include but are not limited to: (new) forms of academic assessment and evaluation and their impact, inter- and transdisciplinarity, the engagement with societal actors in knowledge production, responsible research and innovation, the commercialisation of research and academic capitalism, and university governance and policy. Thematically I have particular interest to supervise thesis studying environmental research broadly defined, the life sciences and/or the social sciences.
Weblink for further information: https://sts.univie.ac.at/en/about-us/scientific-staff/wissenschaftliche-ma/maximilian-fochler/
Email: maximilian.fochler(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Science & Technology Studies and Sociology
Social, economic and cultural studies of pharmaceuticals
Social studies of medicine, health and politics
Science, technology and innovation policy in/for global health
Critical Biopolitics Studies
Methodological focus: qualitative, interpretive and ethnographic approaches
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
- global health governance in relation to Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR)
- political economy of pharmaceutical R&D and biomedical innovation (and innovation policy)
- global health R&D and governance;
- scientific, medical, and policy aspects of AMR governance
Weblink for further information: https://sts.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/wissenschaftliche-mitarbeiterinnen/staff/christian-haddad/
Email: christian.haddad(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
All areas of Journalism Studies. I am particularly interested in the production of journalism, which explores role perceptions of traditional as well as new journalistic actors, including influencers, corporate journalism or party press media. Much of my research is comparative in nature, and interested in how socio-cultural influences shape journalistic practices and professional views. Areas within journalism that are of particular interest to me are local journalism, lifestyle journalism, Indigenous journalism, but I am open to exploring in more detail all other forms of journalism. A further aspect of interest is the broader transformation of journalism culture through technological affordances, as well as audience expectations of news.
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
Boundaries of Journalism, Peripheral actors in journalism, Role perceptions of traditional and non-traditional journalists, Bourdieusian thought in journalism, Lifestyle journalism, Local journalism, Indigenous journalism, Expansions on the concept of embeddedness
Weblink for further information: https://journalismstudies.univie.ac.at/team/folker-hanusch/
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
I am a professor of nursing science, social scientist, and health services researcher. My research focuses on innovations in primary health care and long-term care, with an emphasis on integrated, community-oriented systems for people with chronic conditions. I particularly investigate interprofessional collaboration, evolving nursing roles, and advanced practice models. I contributed to understandings of how user, family, and community participation can be meaningfully embedded in primary health care and long-term care, and the conditions nurses face in promoting it. I have led qualitative, cross-country research and coordinated networks to foster comparative learning and reflexive, context-sensitive methodologies. I have 11 years of leadership experience, supporting early career academics in nursing and public health. I am particularly committed to advancing qualitative methods and international exchange to unlock the potential of research across health and care systems.
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
I am open to doctoral projects in my research areas, in particular
- Primary health care nursing, e.g., role development, advanced nursing practice, continuity of care, interprofessional collaboration.
- Long-term care for older persons, e.g., team-based care, health-oriented leadership
- User/patient experiences with PHC / LTC services, e.g. access, care relationships
- Integrated PHC; coordination and integration of PHC and LTC, respectively health and social care.
- Community-oriented PHC / LTC, e.g. community outreach, community participation, intersectoral approaches
- PHC/LTC in rural and disadvantaged regions/communities
- PHC/LTC and climate change
Projects with an international and global perspective, e.g., through a cross-country comparative approach or cross-country learning in the areas of primary health care, long-term care, and nursing, are welcome.
Weblink for further information: https://pflegewissenschaft.univie.ac.at/en/about-us/pers/kerstin-haemel/
Email: kerstin.haemel(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
My team and I study how people navigate digital environments in daily life, focusing on communication research perspectives. At the intersection of media psychology, health communication, and mobile communication. I am interested in how smartphones and platforms like TikTok or Instagram shape mental health, identity, relationships, and resilience. We study short-form entertainment, influencer culture, online self-diagnosis, and digital disconnection—exploring both how youth engage with media and communication and how they intentionally step away.
Guided by curiosity and critical thinking, I am eager exploring new questions, including but not limited to these:
1) Digital disconnection, digital norms, and everyday media habits
2) AI companions, chatbots, and emerging forms of social relationships
3) Influencers, AI, and contemporary health communication
I welcome theoretically grounded PhD projects that relate to these themes or expand them in new and societally relevant ways.
Weblink for further information: https://www.kathrinkarsay.com/
Email: kathrin.karsay(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Research interests cover the territorial dimension of social policies from a comparative perspective (e.g., analysing ALMP and/or social investment or social assistance policies in different welfare regimes, ....), multilevel governance constellations (local, regional, and national welfare arrangements). Social innovation and participatory practices. Social and ecological sustainability (e.g., investigating trade-offs and/or complementarities between housing and greening policies), as well as transitional phases between school and working life (e.g., different transitions across different schooling systems with different tracking systems and skill formation systems).
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
The relation between social and environmental policies (conflict, synergies, complementarity), considering selected policies and understanding their relationality. The multilevel governance of social policies and rescaling processes for selected policies, considering both vertical (scales of government) and horizontal (type of actors) subsidiarity. The resulting territorial inequality patterns of the rescaling processes.
Weblink for further information: https://www.soz.univie.ac.at/forschung/forschungsteams/team-kazepov/
Email: yuri.kazepov(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
critical medical anthropology, environment and health, medicine and labour, healthcare activism, medicine and politics, feminist science and technology studies, intersectional inequalities in health, biomedicine and supply chains, Latin American (social) medicine, global and planetary health
Weblink for further information: https://health-matters.univie.ac.at/
Email: janina.kehr(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Science and Technology Studies, Social studies of Outer Space, Space Infrastructures, Imaginaries and Politics, Security and Innovation Governance, Space Debris, Science, Technology and International Relations, Critical Security Studies, Space Debris, Futures, Geopolitics
Weblink for further information: https://futurespace-project.eu
Email: nina.witjes(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
My research focuses on Citizens’ Political Attitudes and Voting Behaviour, Democratic Representation, Political Socialization and Communication, and Survey Research.
Weblink for further information: https://staatswissenschaft.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/wissenschaftliches-personal/sylvia-kritzinger/
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
I lead the Political Communication Research Group, which examines the intersection of politics, communication, and citizens. Our work focuses on four main areas:
- AI and digital technologies in political communication,
- diversity of voices in political communication,
- the politics of science communication, and
- the quality of political communication and political journalism. We use a wide range of research methods, from computational approaches and experiments to qualitative research.
I am also one of the coordinators of the new Vienna Doctoral College on Digital Humanism, which trains doctoral candidates to critically examine and shape the digital transformation of society, and I coordinate a new university research platform on trustworthy science communication.
I supervise projects across these areas and methods, with a strong interest in team supervision and internationalisation, including collaborations within and beyond the University of Vienna.
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
Doctoral candidates are free to choose their own topics, and I welcome all proposals that fall within our broader research interests.
However, I am currently expanding our group’s expertise in the following themes, and supervision teams can easily be formed on these themes:
- Digital Humanism (including proposals from candidates from ICT)
- Polycrisis, Resilience and Political Communication
- Sustainability of AI Innovation
- Inclusion, Inequality, and Diversity in the News
- Futures of Political Communication
Weblink for further information: https://polcom.univie.ac.at
Email: sophie.lecheler(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Digital media effects, media psychology, advertising effects, social media, AI and society, environmental communication
Weblink for further information: https://advertisingresearch.univie.ac.at/
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Political institutions of representative democracies, in particular legislative and executive politics; political competition; political communication; voter perceptions of politics (e.g. perceptions of electoral processes & government formation)
Weblink for further information: https://www.thomas-meyer.eu/
Email: thomas.meyer(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
History of development, decolonization, international organizations, North South conflict.
Weblink for further information: https://ie.univie.ac.at/institut/mitarbeiterinnen/wissenschaftliche-mitarbeiterinnen/eva-maria-muschik/
Email: eva-maria.muschik(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Anthropocene, ecological collapse, and political ecology
Energy transition and energy justice
Energy colonialism, green colonialism, and green extractivism
Development theories and development cooperation
Green hydrogen
Green finance
Postcolonial/decolonial studies
Qualitative methods
Social-ecological transformation and transformation conflicts
Western and Southern Africa
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
just hydrogen transition
Green finance + the Green Climate Fund / other green funds
Anthropocene and collective ecological survival
Weblink for further information: https://ufind.univie.ac.at/de/person.html?id=1015976
Email: franziska.mueller(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
My research and supervision focus on family caregiving across the life course, with emphasis on transitional processes but also on children, adolescents, and young adults as caregivers. I am particularly interested in chronic illness in families, children with chronic or palliative care needs, and the development of theory-based complex interventions to support families and those directly affected by illness in home, inpatient, and day-care settings. Further interests include caregiving transitions, the formation of caregiver identity, meaningful participation of children in care, and the promotion of justice and equity in caregiving.
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
Possible doctoral research topics can also include advocacy in care, the health agency and distributed health literacy of children. These topics can be explored in the context of family caregiving and chronicall ore acute illness, highlighting, how families navigate health information and decision-making, and how justice, equity, and empowerment can be promoted in caregiving and health contexts.
Weblink for further information: https://pflegewissenschaft.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/personen/martin-nagl-cupal/
Email: martin.nagl-cupal(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
I supervise theses in the area of health governance with the following themes:
- digital health (apps, e-health)
- public health (eg vaccination, antibiotics, obesity etc)
- the politics of public health monitoring and surveillance (wastewater monitoring, governmental surveillance)
- knowledge politics and evidence based policy(eg consideration of lived experiences in health care reforms, citizen science etc).
My expertise is in qualitative methods.
Weblink for further information: https://www.katharinatpaul.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
- Social constructionism and communicative constructivism, in particular communicative forms of action such as chat communication especially with Generative and Communicative AI (ComAI), communicative genres, interpretive writing, singing, and other forms of sound production;
- Sociality and collectivization through
- digital infrastructures,
- physical coordination and event organization, and
- artifacts
- Crisis of professional expertise and science skepticism; knowledge cultures, climate cultures, literature/climate fiction
Weblink for further information: http://www.soz.univie.ac.at/michaela-pfadenhauer
Email: michaela.pfadenhauer(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Carolina Plescia is Associate Professor in the Department of Government at the University of Vienna. Her research focuses on public opinion, electoral behavior, political representation, and party competition. She investigates how citizens hold elected officials accountable, the relationship between voter satisfaction with electoral institutions and political behavior, and citizens' perceptions of their role in democracies and electoral autocracies. Her work also explores democratic innovations, political participation, and legitimacy. She supervises research on voter attitudes and preferences as well as voting behavior, political representation, and democratic innovations.
Weblink for further information: https://www.carolinaplescia.com
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
As associate professor at the department of nursing science, my research areas encompass palliative care, dementia care and long-term care for elderly people. Within these fields one focus lies on questions along gender and diversity issues as well as feminist care ethics. Psychosocial, organizational and societal aspects are of special interest. My research contributes to understanding how marginalized persons or groups can participate and given space and voice in research, health care and nursing science. Working with interdisciplinary background and in transdisciplinary teams I have many years of experience in leading research projects, doing qualitative, multi-methods and participatory research.
Weblink for further information: https://pflegewissenschaft.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/personen/elisabeth-reitinger/
Email: elisabeth.reitinger(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
At the Vienna Media Change and Innovation Lab, we pursue four research areas:
- Growing up with AI: We examine how AI shapes children’s and adolescents’ learning, social relationships and identity, weighing benefits and risks within family and peer contexts and investigating parental mediation.
- Intergroup relations in virtual environments: We study how AI and VR can both reinforce prejudice by conveying bias and promote social cohesion by reducing language barriers and enabling immersive insights into other cultures.
- Political engagement in digital environments: We analyze how influencers, virtual personalities, social bots and deep fakes affect political opinion, participation, misinformation and trust, with a focus on youth and cross-national comparison.
- Digital media literacy and autonomy: We explore how users regain control in digital spaces through media literacy and self-determination using innovative research methods.
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
Possible themes for doctoral projects (not exhaustive):
• Effects of ChatGPT use on subjective and objective academic performance
• Algorithmic curation on social media shaping adolescent worldviews
• Voice assistants and their impact on childhood communication norms
• Family conflict caused by emerging technologies
• Parental self-efficacy in AI-mediated parenting
• AI translation and quality of intercultural interaction
• VR empathy training and prejudice reduction in schools
• Influencers and virtual influencers in political opinion formation and youth engagement
• Deep fakes, social bots and institutional trust erosion
• Lifespan patterns of digital opinion formation
• Data donations in media research
• Measurement burst designs for behaviour tracking
Weblink for further information: https://mediainnovation.univie.ac.at
Email: desiree.schmuck(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
My attention is currently focused on the following issues. First, I study how the Chinese state seeks to morally engineer society by shaping citizens’ behaviors, values, and beliefs toward greater concern for the common good and toward social conservatism. Second, I investigate how privacy and surveillance are perceived, debated, and negotiated in Chinese society. In particular, I examine how citizens understand different threats to their privacy and how the state frames surveillance in ways that deepen its penetration of society. Third, I analyze how citizens in East Asia (currently Taiwan, South Korea, and China) imagine their political community and identity. Fourth, I am interested in how the process of rapid modernization has affected political culture, values, and behaviors in Chinese-speaking societies.
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
I am open to (co-)supervise topics investigating issues that are related to my current research foci. I can also supervise a broader range of research designs on political culture, political behavior, and contentious politics, when they are comparative and have an East Asian/Chinese angle.
Weblink for further information: http://hcsteinhardt.org/
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
My research and supervision focus on economic anthropology through critical approaches to social reproduction, with a recent emphasis on queer‑Marxian modalities of critique. I examine how labor, gender and sexuality, care, violence, and solidarity organize social life and inequality, and how difference and racialization intersects with the (re)production of capitalist sociality. I study consent to dominant orders, rising authoritarianism, and social movements that imagine alternative futures. I also explore economy’s entanglements with coloniality, including territorial demarcation, the hierarchization of populations, the making of economic entities, and the financialization of nature. I welcome projects on social reproduction, queer‑Marxian critique, economies of care, racial capitalism, coloniality and extraction, and movements for economic transformation.
Weblink for further information: https://ksa.univie.ac.at/en/department/people/professorinnen/streinzer-andreas/
Email: andreas.streinzer(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Population-environment interactions, population projections, spatial demography, assortative mating
Weblink for further information: https://www.wittgensteincentre.org/en/staff/member/striessnig.htm
Email: erich.striessnig(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Anthropology of the State, Kinship, Care, Postsocialist Societies
Weblink for further information:
https://carestate.univie.ac.at/,
https://ksa.univie.ac.at/en/department/people/professorinnen/thelen-tatjana/
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
My research focuses broadly on the role of digital media in youth’s psychosocial, emotional, and cognitive development. I approach digital behaviors from an interpersonal perspective, starting from the premise that peer relationships, group norms, and shared online cultures fundamentally shape how adolescents engage with technology. Key topics include media literacy, the social dynamics that shape digital engagement, and the ways digital media supports young people’s learning, connection, and participation. In addition, my work identifies the circumstances in which digital contexts may challenge well-being. I adopt a broad conceptualization of digital media - encompassing generative AI, social media, and mobile communication - and examine how these technologies shape core developmental outcomes such as identity formation, body image, social functioning, and cognitive processes. Methodologically, my research integrates experimental, longitudinal, ESM, and social network approaches to capture adolescents’ everyday interactions across digital settings.
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
Potential topics or themes could include the social dynamics of adolescents’ digital media use; peer influence and network processes (e.g., friendships) in shaping online engagement; the development digital media literacy and how adolescents apply these skills in their everyday digital interactions; generative AI (e.g., chatbots) use in cognitive, identity, or socio-emotional development; digital communication and its role in belonging and friendship processes; social media influences on body image, self-concept, or well-being; cross-cultural differences in youth’s digital practices; co-presence and ESM approaches to everyday digital experiences; longitudinal studies of online risks and resilience; and the design or evaluation of socially informed, developmentally grounded interventions that support positive and meaningful digital participation.
Weblink for further information:
https://publizistik.univie.ac.at/en/department/staff/jolien-trekels
https://jolientrekels.com/
Email: jolien.trekels(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
The Environmental Politics Research Group (EPRG) at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna conducts sound, excellent, reflexive, relevant and internationally visible research spanning different actors, sites and processes of global environmental agreement-making. Our research strives to be creative, innovative and impactful within and beyond academia. We have a strong focus on empirical research, combining different qualitative and quantitative methods such as event ethnography, social network analysis, surveys, interviews, bibliometrics, oral histories, and text-mining. We approach global environmental politics as unfolding through practices, and social relations. We collect data in, and contributed to the understanding of several international agreements and negotiations such as the Agreement under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea on the Conservation and Sustainable Use of Marine Biological Diversity of Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ Agreement), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution, and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
Weblink for further information: https://envpol.univie.ac.at/
Email: alice.vadrot(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
visual anthropology, media anthropology, urban anthropology
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
research themes related to mobility in everyday life, such as urban cycling
Weblink for further information: https://ksa.univie.ac.at/en/department/people/professorinnen/verstappen-sanderien/
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
I would look forward to supervising topics in the areas of political behavior and party competition. My current research interests are largely related to ideological and affective polarization, political identities, group appeals and democratic support. My past work also focused on models of party competition and communication as well as political emotions and political representation.
Methodologically, I supervise work that uses survey-based and experimental data as well as data based on political texts and expert surveys. I would also be happy to supervise projects that take a mixed methods approach that incorporates focus groups or qualitative interviews.
In terms of geographic area, my main expertise is on Europe, especially the UK, Germany and Austria, but I have also done work on Spain, the Netherlands and Latin America, as well as using large cross-national surveys.
Weblink for further information: www.wagnermarkus.net
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
My research focuses on public spheres, social movements and political communication in times of digitalization, datafication, and artificial intelligence. I study how social issues and social movements emerge on social media and how they are debated. Methodologically, I use computational modeling and simulation as well as empirical methods such as (automated) content analysis, network analysis, and surveys. I'm also very open to mixed-methods approaches.
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
Potential doctoral projects could include, but are not limited to:
- public communication dynamics in the age of generative and agentic AI
- social movements and countermovements in digital spheres
- platform architectures and how they shape public discourses
- algorithmic biases and algorithmic literacy
- emergence of trending topics and social issues on algorithmic social media
- visual themes and narratives on multi-modal platforms
- emergence and measurement of polarization in online social networks
- spatial patterns and geographies of communication
- local and translocal public spheres
Weblink for further information: https://compcommlab.univie.ac.at/team/annie-waldherr/
Email: annie.waldherr(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
PhD candidates with a research interest in the role of gender in digital communication or youth media studies, particularly with regard to questions of media use and effects and with a strong social science perspective, are eligible for supervision.
Weblink for further information: https://polcom.univie.ac.at/team/claudia-wilhelm/
Email: claudia.wilhelm(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
Democratic theory, history of political thought (esp. 19th, 20th and 21th century), political ideologies, threats to democracy
Weblink for further information: https://politikwissenschaft.univie.ac.at/ueber-uns/mitarbeiterinnen/wolkenstein/
Email: fabio.wolkenstein(at)univie.ac.at
Research Interests and Supervision Areas
- Political representation at the citizen and the elite level
- European Union politics and domestic contestation of the EU
- Populist ideology and populist attitudes
- Quantitative and mixed methods research designs (esp. using surveys, focus groups, quantitative text analysis, AI-based content analysis)
Possible research themes or topics for doctoral projects
- Analyzing politics between member state governments in the Council of the European Union through the Council's public deliberations
- Understanding public opinion on the European Union in times of new geopolitical challenges (e.g. Russian war on Ukraine, turmoil in transatlantic relationship)
- Researching what citizens want from political representation
Weblink for further information: www.wratil.eu