Marie Jahoda Winter School 2021

Research and Activism

10th Marie Jahoda Winter School of Sociology

25 - 29 January 2021, Vienna


Since 2010, the Department of Sociology of the University of Vienna has organized its summer/winter school named after Marie Jahoda. To mark the 10th anniversary, the content of this event will be related more closely to the life and work of 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.

The Marie Jahoda Winter School 2021 “Research and Activism” will address the interrelationship between both scientific and political activism in the 21st century and under the conditions of the digital age. The winter school will jointly be held by the Department of Sociology of the University of Vienna and the Digital Futures at Work Research Centre from the Universities of Sussex and Leeds in the UK. To PhD students in sociology and related disciplines from around the world, the summer school will provide the opportunity to reflect and to exchange insights on the link between academic research and political or societal activism. Students will benefit from the winter school in two major ways: First, they may present and get feedback on their PhD projects in which they analyse the interrelation between research and activism. Second, PhD students who are activists themselves may present their research and discuss how they reconcile these roles. The PhD projects may be based on a wide range of research methods including action research.

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