Our Institute

Lukas Arnold is a PhD student working on the FWF-funded research project "Affluence and the gender gap in STEM study choices" led by Prof Dr Wilfred Uunk. He completed a Master's degree in Sociology and a Bachelor's degree in History at the University of Innsbruck and then worked for four years as a research assistant at the Vorarlberg University of Applied Sciences.

Dr. Pia Blossfeld is a university assistant at the University of Innsbruck. She was previously an academic assistant at the University of Leipzig. She completed her doctorate at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include social inequality, social mobility, education, life course research, international comparisons and labour market research.

Student assistant in research and administration.

Student assistant in research and administration.

With a background in development studies, Nora Katharina Faltmann works on social science perspectives on food and agriculture. Her PhD focused on food safety and social inequality in Vietnam. Since October 2022 she works as a postdoctoral researcher in the project 'Exploring values-based modes of production and consumption in the corporate food regime' in which she researches alternative food initiatives across rural mountain and urban areas in Switzerland. A further research focus lies on the construction of animals-as-food at the intersection of food studies and human-animal relations. 

Jacqueline Feurstein completed her bachelor's degree in sociology at the University of Innsbruck and is a student assistant at the Institute of Sociology.
As part of the project "Exploring values-based modes of production and consumption in the corporate food regime", she is writing her Master's thesis in the field of agricultural and regional sociology.

Institutsreferentin

Paul Froning completed his Master's degree in the international Environmental Management of Mountain Areas programme with a focus on regional development and mountain agriculture at the Universities of Innsbruck and Bolzano in 2023. In his master's thesis, he focussed on territorial development strategies based on organic farming in Valposchiavo, Switzerland. He is currently employed as a research assistant in the project "Exploring values-based modes of production and consumption in the corporate food regime".

E-mail:Paul.Froning
Room: w 2.18

Secretary of the Institute

Student assistant in research projects.

Mingming Li is a PhD student working on the FWF-funded research project "Affluence and the gender gap in STEM study choices" led by Prof. Dr Wilfred Uunk. He completed a master's degree in economics at the Central European University in Budapest and Vienna. He then worked as a research assistant at Zhejiang University in Budapest.

Bettina Mahlert is Assistant Professor of General Sociology and Sociological Theory. After studying political science, sociology and ethnology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, she completed her doctorate in 2013 with a thesis on the sociology of global inequalities and habilitated in 2019 on the topic of "Instruments for the observation and evaluation of reality: figures and concepts in global development policy". She was a research associate in the Department of Sociological Theory at Bielefeld University (2007-2012) and RWTH Aachen University (2013-2019), a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre for Global Cooperation Research (University of Duisburg-Essen) (2018-2019), a visiting researcher at the UENF in Campos dos Goytacazes, Brazil, Managing Director of the Institute for World Society (2009-2012) and a scholarship holder in the DFG Research Training Group "World Concepts and Global Structural Patterns" (2004-2007).

Her research has been published in the Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Zeitschrift für Internationale Beziehungen, American Sociologist, European Journal of Development Research, Third World Quarterly, etc. In her current research, Bettina Mahlert deals with the contemporary relevance of Talcott Parsons' early work and processes of (global) cooperation, as well as - from a sociological perspective - with fundamental concepts in the overlapping area of development policy and sociology (e.g. universalism, poverty, basic needs, development).

Katharina Mojescik holds a doctorate in sociology and has been a university assistant at the University of Innsbruck since 2021. After studying social sciences at the Ruhr University Bochum, she worked there as a research assistant at the Institute of Labour Studies (2012-2018). She then conducted research as a project assistant at the Junior Professorship for Qualitative Methods in the project "FLOAT (Forschendes Lernen aus Perspektive von Organisation und Akteuren)" (2017-2020) and at the Institute of Educational Science in the joint project "Your Study - Eigensinnig Studieren im digitalen Zeitalter" (2018-2020). In 2019, she also completed a research stay at the University of British Columbia as part of her doctorate. She also coordinated the research focus Media Worlds at TH Köln (2020 - 2021). She completed her doctorate in sociology at the Ruhr University Bochum in 2021. In her explorative dissertation, she investigated self-employment and entrepreneurial behaviour in the catering industry using the example of food trucks.

In her research, she is currently looking at the changing trends in gainful employment with a focus on new forms of self-employment and entrepreneurship at the interface between the sociology of work, economics and organisation.

Bernadette Müller Kmet has been working as a university assistant in the field of quantitative methods in the social sciences at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Innsbruck since December 2015. She completed her doctorate at the University of Graz in 2009 with a thesis on personal and social identity, focusing on the operationalisation of the concept. A revised version of her dissertation was published in 2011 under the title "Empirische Identitätsforschung. Personal, social and cultural dimensions of self-localisation" published by VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften. Her doctorate was followed by two teaching and research stays at the St. Augustine University of Tanzania (SAUT). As part of this work, she focussed on educational sociology and development policy issues in the higher education sector. From 2009 to 2012, she was a research assistant (research focus: "International comparative and historical social analysis") at the Institute of Sociology at the Karl-Franzens University of Graz. In 2013, she held a deputy position at the Department of Education at the Vienna University of Economics and Business.

Her research interests lie in the areas of identity research, international comparative social research, migration research, educational sociology and social inequality.

Jessica Pflüger is Professor of Mesosociology (Social Institutions and Organisations). She has taught and researched in Munich, Erlangen, Bochum, Cardiff and Hong Kong. Her research focuses on the sociology of work, organisations and science, as well as social research methods.

Andrea Ploder studied sociology, philosophy and law at the Universities of Graz and Utrecht and received her doctorate in 2017 with a thesis on the history of qualitative research. She was a research assistant at the Institute for Philosophy of Law, Sociology of Law and Legal Informatics at the University of Graz (2008-2012, 2013-2016), at the Institute for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy at the University of Salzburg (2012-2013), at the Department of Media Studies at the University of Siegen (2016-2019) and at the Department of Sociology and History at the University of Konstanz (2020-2021). She has also been a visiting researcher at TU Berlin (2013), UC Berkeley (2014, 2018-2020) and the University of Chicago (2015) as well as a lecturer at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main (2013, 2014) and the University of Innsbruck (2019-2021). From 2016-2021 she was a member of the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre "Media of Cooperation" at the University of Siegen.

Her research focuses on qualitative methods and methodology, sociological theory, history of social sciences, sociology of science and science and technology studies.

Silvia Rief is an associate professor and teaches in the field of interpretative sociology and cultural sociology. Her research focuses on the intersection of consumer, economic and technological sociology as well as cultural sociology and the history of social sciences and social theory.

After studying history and German language and literature at the Universities of Salzburg, Berlin and Vienna, she completed her PhD in sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, with a thesis on social stratification processes and experiential consumption in club culture scenes in London. She habilitated at the University of Innsbruck in 2016 on the topic of social aestheticisation processes. She was a scholarship holder of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council, UK), lecturer at the London School of Economics, Goldsmiths College, the University of Kent (2003-2004) and the Open University (2002-2012). A two-year research stay took her to Harvard University between 2017 and 2019 (Joseph A. Schumpeter Fellowship, Botstiber Fellowship).

Her research has been published in, among others: Sociology Compass, Journal of Cultural Economy, European Journal of Social Theory, New Political Economy. Silvia Rief's current research focusses on socio-technical systems and infrastructures of everyday care, in particular drinking water infrastructure (RESIST research project), as well as historical and current social science debates on social knowledge, 'social calculation' and planning.

ORCID link

Markus Schermer completed his degree in agricultural economics at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna in 1983. From 1984 to 1999 he worked in development co-operation, agricultural consultancy and spatial planning outside the university. Since 1999 he has been working at the University of Innsbruck, where he completed his doctorate at the Institute of Sociology in 2004. His habilitation in sociology followed in 2008. From 2008-2010 he was head of the Institute of Sociology, until 2020 he was deputy head of the institute. From 2010-2014, he was a lecturer. He was also head of the Mountain Agriculture Research Centre from 2005 to 2008 and has been deputy head since then.

His research focuses on the following areas: Social developments in food production and consumption; Territorial approaches to regional development; Changes in the cultural landscape in mountain areas; Position of farmers in society

Carla Scheytt is doing her doctorate in the field of mesosociology on the topic of "Research ethics in qualitative social research". She studied at the Ruhr University Bochum (RUB) and specialised in methods of empirical social research in her Master's degree in "Social Science". She then worked at RUB as a research assistant at the Junior Professorship for Qualitative Methods and at the Chair of Sociology/Organisation, Migration, Co-determination (2020-2022) and has been a research assistant in the team of Prof. Dr. Jessica Pflüger since October 2022. The dissertation is funded by a DOC scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW).

Studied sociology at the University of Vienna and at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS), Vienna. 1994 Habilitation in sociology at the University. 1991/92 Erwin Schrödinger Fellow at UCLA and the University of Maryland, College Park.

1994-97 APART Fellow (Austrian Programme for Advanced Research and Technology) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences with research stays at the University of Chicago, Stanford University and the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

1995 Awarded the Cardinal Innitzer Sponsorship Prize

2012/13 Visiting Scholar at Harvard University

3/2013 - 2/2021 Dean of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences

Visiting professorships at UT Knoxville, FU Bolzano and the Austrian universities in Graz, Linz and Salzburg; numerous guest lectures at universities in the USA, Italy, Japan and Australia

Rike Stotten is an associate professor at the Institute of Sociology and head of the Agricultural and Regional Sociology working group. Her research focuses thematically on rural sociology and agro-food studies and spatially on mountain regions. She is interested in the diverse relationships and interdependencies between urban and rural areas, production and consumption, as well as the underlying processes, structures and power relations. She is spokesperson for the Rural Social Research Section of the Austrian Sociological Society and deputy spokesperson for the Mountain Agriculture Research Centre at the University of Innsbruck.

She studied geography and sociology at the Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Universität Aachen and graduated with a master's thesis on the acceptance of nature conservation measures at the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture in Switzerland. She worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Spatial and Landscape Development at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and at the Competence Centre for Urban and Regional Development at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. She was habilitated in 2023 with her thesis on 'European Mountain Areas as Socioscapes: An Integrative Perspective in Rural Sociology'.

Wilfred Uunk is a professor of sociology. He comes from the Netherlands, studied sociology in Utrecht and obtained his doctorate in 1996 in Nijmegen on the subject of homogamy (similarity in partner characteristics). Between 1996-1998, Uunk was a post-doc at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin (topic: job mobility in East and West Germany) and from 1998-2002 a post-doc in Utrecht (topic: remarriage). He then worked at Tilburg University until 2017; first as a post-doc, then as Junior Professor of Sociology (topics: Divorce, Gender and Labour, Migration, Welfare Solidarity). From 2017-2020, Uunk was a research associate with a chair in sociology at the University of Bamberg (topic: gender and education) and from 2020-2021 senior researcher at The Hague University of Applied Sciences. In May 2021, he finally accepted a professorship in Macro Sociology and Social Inequality at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Innsbruck.

Wilfred Uunk conducts research on various forms of social inequality (e.g., by gender and migration status). His research often compares countries and he uses quantitative methods of social research.

Sarah von Karger completed a Bachelor's degree in Journalism and Communication Studies at the University of Vienna and then went on to complete a Master's degree in Sociology at the University of Innsbruck. In her master's thesis, she analysed the differences in Bourdieu's and Butler's theories on language in terms of their stability and dynamics. The title of her master's thesis was: "Performativity of language. A theoretical examination of the practical dimension of speech". Von Karger has been working as a university assistant and project worker at the Social Theory Research Centre at the Institute of Sociology at the University of Innsbruck since October 2020.

In this context, she is writing her dissertation on the relationship between migration and development by examining transnational engagement in African migrant organisations in German-speaking countries.

Lisa Waldenburger has been working at the University of Innsbruck since 2024 in the research project "Learning from long-term care practices for the European Care Strategy (LeTs-Care)". After studying sociology and human geography at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena, she conducted research on the "Intimisation of the Public" (University of Zurich) and "Digital Stress in Everyday Media Life" (University of Augsburg). She also completed her doctorate under Prof. Dr Hartmut Rosa at the FSU Jena on the topic of "Resonance and Alienation on Facebook - An Empirical Study on the Sociology of World Relations". She specialises in the fields of digital culture/media sociology, social theory/critical realism, current social theories and qualitative methods. In her research, she is currently focussing on innovative practices in long-term care and the understanding of care in Austria.

Lisa Waldenburger is a researcher at the University of Innsbruck, working on the research project 'Learning from long-term care practices for the European Care Strategy (LeTs-Care)'. She has a background in sociology and human geography, and has conducted research on topics such as the 'Intimisation of the Public' and 'Digital Stress in Everyday Media Life'. She completed her doctorate on 'Resonance and Alienation on Facebook' under the supervision of Prof Dr Hartmut Rosa. Her areas of expertise include digital culture/media sociology, social theory/critical realism, current social theories, and qualitative methods. Currently, her research is focused on innovative long-term care practices and the understanding of care in Austria.

Bernhard Weicht studied economics (specialising in social policy) at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and social policy at the University of Nottingham (UK). He received his PhD in 2010 from the University of Nottingham with a thesis on the social and moral construction of care and care work for older people. As a Marie Curie Fellow, he continued his research at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. During this period, he focussed on the interplay and links between migration and social policy in Austria, the Netherlands and the UK, and their impact on migrants working in the care sector. Before coming to the University of Innsbruck, he worked as a lecturer at Leiden University College. In 2018, he completed his habilitation with the topic "A Caring Sociology for Ageing Societies".

Bernhard Weicht publishes primarily on the topics of care work, dependencies, migration and care, social and migration policy, as well as the discursive construction of ageing and care. He is the author of the monograph "The Meaning of Care" and editor of "Commonalities of Global Crises" (both published by Palgrave Macmillan). He was chair of the Ageing in Europe research network of the European Sociological Association and is currently co-spokesperson of ESPANet Austria.

Frank Welz is Professor of Sociology, Vice President of the European Sociological Association (ESA) and - since 2006 - a passionate Innsbrucker, when he came to the Leopold Franzens University after studying sociology, philosophy, psychology and history in Freiburg i. Br. as well as research and teaching in Freiburg, Basel, Bielefeld, Durban, New Delhi (JNU), Onati and Cambridge (UK/US).

In his research, Frank Welz initially focussed on the phenomenological concept of the lifeworld (dissertation), i.e. people's view of the reality of their lives, i.e. a kind of perspective "from below". Since his time in Innsbruck (habilitation), his interest has increasingly shifted to the perspective "from above": To what extent are people's orientations, attitudes and interests "produced" by society?

Current projects: Historical epistemology of the social sciences; constitution of crisis and critique; "subjectivities" - governmentality and field analysis

Thea Xenia Wiesli has been a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology since 2023. Her research interests lie in the areas of sustainable development, food studies, meat consumption, animal-human relations and regional sociology. In her PhD, she investigated the connection between sustainability and high quality of life in rural regions and nature parks. In other research projects at the Centre for Development and Environment at the University of Bern, she worked on the resettlement of mountain villages, food policies and food justice