We welcome Univ.-Prof. Dr. Anna Durnová at our Department!

Univ. Prof. Dr. Anna Durnová holds the professorship of Political Sociology at the Institute of Sociology since November 2021.

Univ.-Prof. Mag. Dr. Anna Pospech Durnová introduces herself:

 

"I am a Professor of Political Sociology at the Department of Sociology, University of Vienna. I hold a Ph.D. in comparative literature and political science with a "Habilitation à diriger des recherches" from Sciences PO Paris.

I am also a Faculty Fellow at the Yale University Center for Cultural Sociology and serve as a member of the Editorial Board of the journal Policy & Politics and as a member of the Executive Committee of the International Public Policy Association.

Until 2021, I was a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna (among others as an Elise-Richter Fellow, funded by FWF). I have also worked as a researcher and lecturer at Charles University in Prague and the University of Lyon. I was a Visiting Research Fellow at Concordia University in Montreal in 2019 and at Essex University in 2012.

In addition to my academic work, I occasionally participate in public debates on democracy, emotions, or Austrian politics and society, mainly on Czech Television and Czech Radio. I also write opinion editorials, among others, for the Czech daily Hospodářské Noviny or the Austrian daily Der Standard.

In my research, I study emotions as a nexus for the tension between privacy and public institutions and their influence on our actions and norms.

Emotions - expressions of our feelings and contexts of polarizing discussions around social developments - are shaped by our social, cultural, and ideological backgrounds. My research focus is thus on the way emotions are interpreted and how they form a basis for socio-political debates. The main interest is better to understand the multiple tensions between citizens and institutions.

I work with interpretive methods, and the motto of my research is a reflective approach to the research topic: I think that the appropriate data collection methods are best identified through the research question and, more importantly, after having spent some time in the field. I enjoy discussing research - preferably when it is still at the beginning; then the best questions can be asked and received.

My main areas of work are Political Sociology, Sociology of Emotions, Cultural Sociology, Public Policy, Sociological Theories of Liberal Democracy, Feminist Theories, Women's Health and Sociology of the Body, and Interpretive Methods."

 

 

Photography of Anna Durnová