Team Anna Durnova

Professor of Political Sociology at the Department of Sociology, University of Vienna, and Faculty Fellow at the Yale University Center for Cultural Sociology. She also serves as a member of the editorial boards of the journals Policy & Politics, and Critical Policy Studies.
Previously, she was a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna (Elise Richter Fellow), as well as at Charles University in Prague, and the University of Lyon. Her research focuses on the role of emotions in democratic societies. She is currently the Consortium Leader of the CIDAPE Project (Climate, Inequality and Democratic Action: The Force of Political Emotions; Horizon Europe 2024-2027) and Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant LONERS (2026-2031). In 2024 Anna received the Mattei Dogan Foundation Prize for European Political Sociology. 
Research interests: political sociology, sociology of emotions, public policy, feminist sociology, interpretive social research. 

Hannah is studying for a master's degree in Sociology at the University of Vienna and is a student assistant at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the field of gender and education. At the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna, she worked as a transcriber on the project “Crafting liberal democracy through self-determination” and is currently researching violence in obstetrics in Austria. Related to this research she is writing her master's thesis, which focuses on the emotional competence of midwives in this context. Hannah’s focus lies on the sociology of emotions and knowledge, as well as interpretive social research. Among other things, she examines the hierarchization of knowledge in institutional and social contexts and the situational regulation of emotions.

Sylvia is studying sociology at the University of Vienna, worked as a teaching assistant at the Department of Sociology from 2021 to 2024 and has been working as a research assistant in the projects ‘Self-Determination of Liberal Democracy’ and CIDAPE (Climate, Inequality, Democratic Action and the Force of Political Emotions) since February 2023. Sylvia's research interests lie in sociological dimensions of power/knowledge, emotions and bodies, with a queer-feminist, intersectional approach. Sylvia researches the correlation between discursive knowledge and power, and the affective inscriptions of the hierarchisation of epistemologies. Their master's thesis on the affective manifestation of un/knowing in the lesbian self focuses on precisely these intersections. Sylvia's general research focuses on power/knowledge, affect theory and interpretative methods.

Till Hilmar received his PhD in sociology from Yale University in 2019 and is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology, Vienna University. He is a faculty fellow at Yale University’s Center for Cultural Sociology and an associate editor of the American Journal of Cultural Sociology. His research interests include qualitative approaches to inequality, cultural and political sociology, social memory, post-1989 transformations, and text-as-data. He is interested in popular ideas about economic inequality and is developing methodological approaches to understand cultural narratives about economic change.
Starting March 2024, he is a PI in the Horizon Project CIDAPE on inequality, climate change and the force of political emotions. His book Deserved. Economic Memories after the Fall of the Iron Curtain, published with Columbia University Press in 2023, examines popular experiences of the East German and the Czech post-1989 transformations in a comparative perspective.

Vendula is a doctoral student at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at Oxford University. She earned her degree in Law and Jurisprudence from Charles University and an LLM in Health, Law, and Society from the University of Bristol. Since 2022, Vendula has been involved in the international research project REACTOR at the University of Vienna, which examines resistance to authorities in media, politics, and science across the Czech Republic, Denmark, the USA, Great Britain, and the Netherlands. Her prior experience includes judicial training at the Supreme Administrative Court of the Czech Republic, which qualified her for the judiciary, and a traineeship at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Health and Food Safety, where she now serves as an external consultant specializing in tobacco control, disease prevention, and health promotion. Her research interests lie at the intersection of legal theory and socio-legal studies, with a particular focus on health-related issues.

Runya Qiaoan is a Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Sociology, University of Vienna. She received her PhD in Sociology from Masaryk University in 2018, where her dissertation explored civil society policy advocacy in China through a cultural sociological lens. Her research interests include state-society relations, civil society, and digital governance. She has been a researcher in major EU-funded projects, including ReConnect China and Sinofon Borderlands, examining China’s domestic governance and its global interactions. Dr. Qiaoan is the author of "Civil Society in China: How Society Speaks to the State" (Routledge, 2021). Her work has appeared in leading journals such as Social Movement Studies, Journal of Chinese Political Science, and Philosophy & Social Criticism. She also contributes to scholarly discussions on digital populism, political communication, and authoritarian governance.

Since February 2025, Runya Qiaoan has been conducting research under the MSCA CZ Postdoctoral Fellowship, co-funded by the European Union and the Czech Republic. Her project explores the Chinese civil sphere through the lenses of cultural sociology and the sociology of emotions, with a particular focus on youth subcultural movements and their impact on social norms.

Anna is studying for a Master's degree in Sociology and a Bachelor's degree in Political Science at the University of Vienna. After spending a semester abroad at Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul, she started working as a student assistant for Anna Durnová in September 2024. She has also collaborated on the departmental project "Klimaalltag in Österreich". Anna's main areas of interest and research lie in engaged sociology, sociology of emotions, and political sociology. She explores feminist movement history, discursive formations, and the intersection of politics and the public sphere, e.g. with regard to reproductive rights and the challenges posed to existing norms.

Sarah studied International Relations with French at the University of Westminster and Journalism at Birkbeck College in London. Since 2024, she has been a project researcher at CIDAPE (Climate Inequality and Democratic Action: The Force of Political Emotions - Horizon Europe, 2024 - 2027), where she focuses on international political sociology and cultural sociology. For her doctoral thesis, she is investigating spirituality and emotions in the climate change discourse with a focus on Tibetan Buddhism. She has previously worked intensively on the Tibet conflict, both academically and in the context of human rights work.

Julia studied sociology at the universities of Vienna and Copenhagen. Alongside her studies, she worked as a student assistant at the Institute for Advanced Studies, focusing on topics related to new technologies, ethics, and gender. Since 2022, Julia has been working in the field of political sociology at the Department of Sociology, researching issues of self-determination in liberal democracies. Complementary to her research in political sociology, her focus particularly lies on the intersection of labor and industrial sociology, feminist social theory, and Critical Theory.

Marvin studied economics and sociology at the University of Vienna. He is currently working on his master's thesis in sociology on the topic of political polarisation in Austria. Since 2025, he has been supporting the CIDAPE project, in particular with research work, and is also involved as a COST member in the COST Action CA22165 DepolarisingEU project. Previously, Marvin worked for almost two years as a study assistant in Nadia Steiber's team and as a member of the FRAMA project.

His research interests include primarily theories of social inequality - focussing on work and employment, in particular the distribution of work and class or milieu-specific attitudes - and political sociology.

Dagmar Vorlíček is a university assistant (post-doc) at the Department of Sociology, University of Vienna. Her research focuses on the sociology of crisis and the politics of global insecurities. Dagmar is an interdisciplinary social scientist drawing on sociology, International Relations, and Science and Technology Studies. Empirically, she specializes in global health and biological security. She conducted and published research on bioweapons, biotechnologies, biobanks, dual-use research, and global health.
Dagmar serves as the Head of Board of the Institute of International Relations Prague and as a member of the Executive Board of the Central and East European International Studies Association (CEEISA). She is also a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Global Health Policy, University of Sussex, a Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IHS) Vienna, and a member of the Transnational Hub "Doing International Political Sociology". Previously, she worked as a Lecturer in Global Insecurities at the University of Sussex and was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the IHS Vienna. She holds a Ph.D. in International Relations (Charles University in Prague), an M.A. in Comparative and International Studies (ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich) and an LLM in Law and Politics of International Security (VU University Amsterdam).

Zita holds a BSc degree in International Business Administration and a MSc degree in Sustainable Development. She is responsible for the daily operational, administrative and financial tasks as well as communication and dissemination activities in the Horizon Europe project, CIDAPE (Climate Inequality and Democratic Action: The Force of Political Emotions, 2024 - 2027). She assists the consortium with the preparation of project reporting and deliverables.

Currently, she also administers the ERC funded project DeVOTE at the Department of Government. She has been working on international projects in the field of communication science (OPTED) and environmental sustainability before joining the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna.