Marie Jahoda Summer School 2024

Crises, justice, democracy

July 8th - July 12th 2024, Vienna

Since 2010, the Department of Sociology of the University of Vienna has organized its summer/winter school named after Marie Jahoda. In her early years as a researcher in Vienna, when Marie Jahoda conducted, among others, the famous study “The Unemployed of Marienthal”, she was an active member of the Socialdemocratic Workers’ Party. Around 1930, she was convinced that, after a democratic and non-violent upheaval of society in Austria, she would become minister for education. However, Austro-Fascism took power in 1934, and from then on Marie Jahoda clandestinely worked for the Revolutionary Socialists, without putting aside her research activities. Imprisoned in 1936, she had to leave the country in 1937. From 1948 to 1958 Marie Jahoda was a professor of social psychology at New York University and from 1965 to 1973 at the University of Sussex.

Marie Jahoda Summer School of Sociology 2024

Societies in Europe and across the world are increasingly under strain: rising inequalities, global instability, and dramatic state action to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, climate crisis, energy crises, security crises, and many others. These events exacerbate existing inequalities or create new ones. Yet how are crises experienced, narrated, anticipated, and remembered? How does that influence the ways we address them? And how do societal inequalities and social, political, and gender orders create crisis perceptions and perpetuate them?

This Summer School offers a multidisciplinary perspective on crisis in the social sciences, drawing on sociology and insights from political science, International Relations, history, and anthropology. It will specifically explore why some processes are constructed as “crisis processes”, while others remain rather subtle, “under the radar”. It will also focus on the multiple actors shaping how crises are understood and addressed in current societies.

In a week of exchange and collaboration, the Summer School looks for responses to these issues and invites contributions from all academic disciplines. The Summer School is open for early-stage academics (predoc, postdoc) from various disciplinary contexts, who will be given the opportunity to present and discuss their work with peers and specialists in depth.

The Marie Jahoda Summer School 2024 is organized by and will take place at the Institute for Sociology, University of Vienna. A total of 6 ECTS points are awarded for the participation. 

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