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Please save the date for our first CaSt outreach event Relations, Boundaries, Measurements: New Publications of the Care and State research network.

Monday, 18. November 2024 | 5 p.m. (UTC +1)
HS-A, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
Universitätsstraße 7, AT-1010 Vienna
*** hybrid event – join online ***

At this event, we will present our research and specifically new publications in a hybrid format. More information will follow soon!

CaSt welcomes Amélie Renz (Wageningen University) and Petra Ezzeddine (Charles University) as new members!

Ivan Rajković received two fellowships for the coming academic year: from October 2024 to January 2025, he will be a fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna (Austria). Afterwards, he will hold a fellowship at the CEU Institute of Advanced Studies in Budapest (Hungary) from February to June 2025.

Vincent Duibois has been elected senior member at the Institut Universitaire de France for the years 2024-2029. He will dedicate this fellowship to his project on Lower Classes and Public Institutions (LoCl).

We are happy to announce that Letizia Bonanno will join our local CaSt group in Vienna with funding by the Research Platform Transformations and Eastern Europe to further develop her project “Steel Lives” in Taranto and Galati.

Ilona Grabmaier‘s dissertation Stayed at home. (Re)Configurations of Care in Rural Ukraine [in German] has been awarded a sponsorship award by the Dr. Maria Schaumayer Foundation – congratulations!

The German Research Foundation (DFG) has granted funding for Ahmad Moradi‘s three-year project Beyond Humanitarianism: Disability Care and Belonging of Afghan Veterans in Iran. The position will start from January 2025 and will be hosted by the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin.

For decades, the Iranian state has sent Hazara male refugees from Afghanistan to fight in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and the war against the Islamic State in Syria (2011 onward), from which many returned disabled. Ahmad’s research aims to explore the social life of these two generations of Afghan veterans in contemporary Iran, their exclusion from care and compensation, and their ambiguous status as refugees who fought for their host country.

Christof Lammer was invited to a one-year fellowship (April 2024 to March 2025) at HU Berlin by the newly founded centre for advanced studies Käte Hamburger Kolleg inherit – Heritage in Transformation. There he is working on the project “Panda Heritage: Kinship Measurements and Life’s Value in Species Conservation”.

Alexandra Schwell‘s FWF project Competing Urgencies: Translating Climate Neutrality in the European Union (EU-URGE) started in April. EU-URGE ethnographically accompanies the three cities of Klagenfurt, Warsaw and Ljubljana in their efforts to achieve climate neutrality.

Tatjana Thelen joins a discussion of Hilal Alkan’s new book Welfare as Gift: Local Charity, Politics of Redistribution, and Religion in Turkey. The book presentation will take place on 30 April 2024 at 5:00 pm at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin, Germany). For further information click here.

The University of Vienna is looking to hire 7 PhD researchers within the framework of the new interdisciplinary FWF doc.funds program The Dynamics of Change and the Logics of Transformation: State, Society, and Economy at Critical Junctures (with participation of Tatjana Thelen among others) starting on 1 September 2024.

The seven doctoral projects are situated in a field defined by interlocking key themes: the transformation of statehood & sovereignty, of labor, of mobility, and of rights. They focus on Central & Eastern Europe, with important transnational and global extensions. The objective is to combine insights from history and social sciences to study transformations in the wake of major ruptures during the 20th and 21st centuries.

For more details and the application link, please visit: https://www.recet.at/event-news/news/detail/cfa-7-phd-positions

>>> Application deadline is April 12th 2024. <<<

Ilona Grabmaier‘s article “Die Grenzen gegenseitiger Unterstützung: geschlechtsspezifische Konstruktionen von (un)deservingness in der ländlichen Ukraine” will be published in volume 7 of the series “Wiener Galizien-Studien” in November. Click here for the English abstract.

Ilona Grabmaier has successfully defended her PhD thesis “STAYED AT HOME. RE/CONFIGURING CARE IN RURAL UKRAINE” – congratulations!

Cast congratulates Julia Malik on being awarded a Marietta Blau-Grant! With this scholarship, she is able to continue her fieldwork for her PhD project “Classifying Citizens, Updating the State: How Practicing Digital Welfare Shapes Statehood in Colombia” and to connect with researchers at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá (Colombia).

Anna Žabicka has been awarded the 2023-2024 Dissertation Grant for Graduate Students – congratulations!
With this support, she will join the University of Oxford’s Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society as a visiting academic for the fall 2023 and continue work on her dissertation project there.

Tatjana Thelen was an expert guest on the German podcast Studio Komplex talking about marriage and its connection to the state – have a listen here.

Christof Lammer’s article Care Scales: Dibao Allowances, State and Family in China (The China Quarterly) is now available online.

As the first anthropologist in this position, Tatjana Thelen will take up the Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professorship at Stanford University from January to June 2023. Congratulations!

Ivan Rajković is a guest researcher at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Sciences (University of Belgrad) from 1 October 2022 until 31 March 2023. His stay is funded by the Joint Excellence in Science and Humanities (JESH) Grant of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. During his stay, he will work on his project “Whither ecopopulism? Energy transition and popular environmental mobilizations in the Balkans”.

Letizia Bonnano was a guest on the podcast The Familiar Strange, talking about her fieldwork in a social clinic of solidarity in Athens and the impact of austerity policies on people seeking healthcare in Greece at that time.

CaSt congratulates Anna Žabicka on being awarded the Marietta Blau Grant!
The scholarship allows her to continue her PhD project “Aging, care, and imagined futures in rural Latvia” with research stays at the University of Iowa (US) and the University of Oxford (UK) in 2023.

CaSt welcomes Julia Malik (Alpen-Adria-University of Klagenfurt) and Saskya Tschebann (ÖAW DOC Fellow) as new members of our research network.

Tatjana Thelen and Christof Lammer guest-edited the Special Issue of Social Analysis 65 (4) which is out now: Measuring Kinship: Gradual Belonging and Thresholds of Exclusion.

Ilona Grabmaier published the working paper “Negotiating the Limits of Care. Moralised Constructions of (Un)Deservingness in Rural Ukraine.” (= Vienna Working Papers in Ethnography no. 12)

Marlene Persch published the working paper “Der sorgende Staat? Sorgenarrative im Jugendgefängnis in Accra, Ghana.” (= Vienna Working Papers in Ethnography no. 13)

Politics and Kinship: A Reader, edited by Tatjana Thelen and Erdmute Alber is available now.

Call for Papers: 6th Vienna Ethnography Laboratory “Relating Risks” (September 28-30, 2022). Deadline for applications: March 15, 2022.

CaSt congratulates Ahmad Moradi on winning the SIEF Young Scholar Prize 2021 for his article “The Basij of neighbourhood. Techniques of government and local sociality in Bandar Abbas”.

Ivan Rajković published a book chapter on state paternalism in public-private partnerships: FIAT Automobiles Serbia: the split moral economy of public-private partnerships.

CaSt welcomes Quirin Rieder and Sofía Ugarte as new members.

Olia Kazakevich and Anne Sophie Grauslund join CaSt as guests – welcome!

“Political belonging through elder care: Temporalities, representations and mutuality” by Tatjana Thelen and Cati Coe is now available in Chinese: 养老带来政治归属：时间维度、表征形式以及相互性. Translated by Wu Xiu-jie. Journal of Qinghai Nationalities University 46, no. 4 (2020): 9-21.

Anna Ellmer has started to work at the Department of Health at Bern University for Applied Science in Switzerland. Employed as a Post-Doc, she is pursuing research on the project “Caring about Diversities”, which focusses on everyday practices of elderly care in Swiss nursing homes. Congratulations!

CaSt member Ahmad Moradi has joined Freie Universität Berlin as visiting scholar for 2021-2023. Congratulations!

Open position as University Assistant (prae doc) at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology under the supervision of Tatjana Thelen (State, Care, Kinship, Property) — Deadline: 31 March 2021.

>>> View detailed description (PDF)
>>> Apply via Jobcenter

CaSt congratulates Marlene Persch on being awarded a scholarship at Vienna Doctoral School of Social Sciences (ViDSS). Her PhD project “Becoming a State Actor: Prison Officer Training in Accra, Ghana” focuses on the transformation of non-state actors into state actors in the training of prison staff in Ghana and the production of state awareness.

CaSt is happy to welcome two new members: Ahmad Moradi and Letizia Bonanno.

Call for papers – open until November 26:
Panel ‘CARE AS ACT OF TRANSGRESSION’ at SIEF2021 15th congress ‘BREAKING THE RULES? POWER, PARTICIPATION, TRANSGRESSION’ (21-24 June 2021, online).

Lukas Milo Strauss will soon change his institutional affilitation to the Department of Cultural Analyses (Empirical Cultural Analysis / Cultural Anthropology Unit) at Alpen-Adria-University Klagenfurt. Employed as a PhD candidate he will pursue research on the project “Brokering the care gap: the institutional trajectory of European care migration”. Congratulations!

“There is no doubt that Reconnecting state and kinship could open a new page in the study of the interrelation of kinship and the state […]”

Dmitri M. Bondarenko (International Center of Anthropology, National Research University Higher School of Economics/Institute for African Studies, Russian Academy of Sciences) reviewed Reconnecting state and kinship (2017), edited by Tatjana Thelen and Erdmute Alber.

Read the whole review in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (Volume 26, Issue 1).

CaSt congratulates Ilona Grabmaier for receiving a Marietta Blau Scholarship and a Leopold Kretzenbacher Scholarship of the Schroubek Fonds Eastern Europe that allows her to persue her research until end of April at the Zentrum für Osteuropa- und Internationale Studien / Centre for East European and International Studies in Berlin and from May to July at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology.

Tatjana Thelen will spend the academic year 2020-21 (September – June) as fellow at The Paris Institute for Advanced Study / Institut d’études avancées de Paris.

CaSt welcomes Alexandra Schwell as a new member.

CaSt welcomes Vincent Dubois and Larissa Vetters as new members.

Call for 5th Ethnography Laboratory ‘Mobilities and Care’ open now: click here for further details.

CaSt congratulates Marlene Persch and Lukas Milo Strauss for successfully defending their Master Thesis.

CaSt congratulates Christof Lammer for receiving ‘Promotio sub auspiciis Praesidentis rei publicae’!
>>> Read the faculty’s announcement here.

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