A Look Back at the First Year of the Department of Society, Knowledge, and Politics (SoKPol)

On January 1, 2024, three smaller institutes merged to form the new Department of Society, Knowledge, and Politics. In this report, we reflect on the personal and academic highlights of the first year of “SoKPol.”

Report by Helene Sorgner

Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, and Science Communication and Higher Education Research: These three fields of study, previously represented by separate organizational units at AAU, have been united under one roof since early 2024. The newly established Department of Society, Knowledge, and Politics builds on the shared interests of its members, fostering more intensive exchange and new synergies—as demonstrated by numerous activities during the first year.

Research Stays Abroad

The first half of the year was characterized by research-related absences as several department members embarked on extended stays abroad.

From November 2023 to the end of March 2024, Anja Bauer completed a research stay at Arizona State University (ASU) as part of her tenure-track agreement. She spent the initial phase at the School of the Future of Innovation in Society in Tempe, Arizona,followed by two months at the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes in Washington, D.C.. The stay resulted in lectures and publications addressing the authority of scientific policy advice in an era of polarization and post-truth politics.

Julia Malik spent 13 months in Colombia for her dissertation project. Her ethnographic fieldwork on a digital classification and administration system for social welfare was supported by a Marietta Blau Grant and mobility funding from the University of Klagenfurt.

Christof Lammer has been a fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center “inherit. heritage in transformation” at Humboldt University in Berlin since April 2024. Studying the case of the giant panda, he examines how humans measure kinship to protect species, and how this transforms not only human-animal  relations but also power relations in society, bureaucracy and  politics.

Research Projects

The year 2024 brought numerous new projects to the institute, along with new team members.

Erik Aarden has been co-leading a project titled “The Governance of and through Tests” since April, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) and conducted in collaboration with Ingrid Metzler (Karl Landsteiner Private University for Health Sciences). The project examines the testing strategies of three European countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Viktoria Meklin will be writing her dissertation as a research associate on this project.

Another project by Erik Aarden, “Making Meanings of Biodiversity: Species Monitoring and Science Communication at Two Austrian Biosphere Reserves,” is funded by the AAU Research Council. Together with master’s student Jasmin Gramschek, he investigates the practices and concepts of biodiversity in the Nockberge and Wienerwald biosphere reserves.

Under the leadership of Martina Merz and with contributions from Daniel Barben, the “City Science Lab (University of Klagenfurt): Climate & Cities Missions in Action” secured over one million euros from a special budget of the Austrian Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF). The project aims to support Klagenfurt on its path to climate neutrality. A university hub, based at the Department of Society, Knowledge, and Politics, will bring together researchers from various disciplines and drive a just transition to a climate-resilient city of the future.

Publications

Lammer, Christof. 2024. Performing State Boundaries: Food Networks, Democratic Bureaucracy and China. New York: Berghahn Books.

Staff Updates

  • Anja Bauer received tenure in January, becoming an Associate Professor. She is among the first to achieve qualification under AAU’s new tenure-track model.
  • Helmut Guggenberger, former head of the Institute for Sociology, retired in October but remains affiliated with AAU as a lecturer.
  • Michael Jonas joined the team taking on teaching responsibilities from Christof Lammer.
  • Martina Merz resumed her full teaching and research activities at the institute in December after serving four years as Vice-Rector for Research.
  • Helene Sorgner returned from parental leave in September.
  • Daria Jadreškić transitioned to the Digital Age Research Center (D!ARC) at AAU following the end of the research project “Producing Novelty & Securing Credibility in LHC-Experiments.”

Department Retreat

On September 25 and 26, 2024, the institute held its first joint retreat at St. Georgen/Längsee. In-depth discussions covered shared teaching content, research interests, and institutional responsibilities. A hike around the lake was followed by a celebratory farewell for Helmut Guggenberger.

Department Retreat in St.Georgen. Credit: Kornelia Kanyo

Research Colloquium

The winter semester of 2024/25 marked the launch of a new event format: the research colloquium. In this series, the institute’s researchers present their current work. Open to all interested parties, the colloquium fosters exchange beyond institutional boundaries. Initial presentations included Anja Bauer (on insights from her research stay in the U.S.), Erik Aarden (on biodiversity monitoring practices in an Austrian national park), and Vedran Duančić (on techno-optimism in the final years of Yugoslavia).

Holiday Celebration

A special highlight at the end of the year was a joint dinner at Gasthaus im Landhaushof. For some institute members, this was a long-standing tradition; for others, a new experience. The gathering marked the conclusion of a successful year and the beginning of new traditions, reflecting a growing institute with strong foundations and ambitious plans for the future.

Invitation to the research colloquium of the Institute for Society, Knowledge and Politics: How to know a national park? Monitoring practices and the enactment of biodiversity in Neusiedler See – Seewinkel National Park Austria. Ass.-Prof.Dr. Erik Aarden am 28. November 2024 von 15:15-16:45 Uhr im S.2.05

How to know a national park? Monitoring practices and the enactment of biodiversity in Neusiedler See – Seewinkel National Park, Austria

To confront the ongoing global ‘biodiversity crisis’ various international agreements have presented ambitious aims for the preservation and restoration of threatened ecosystems. Entwined with these aims, different categories of protected areas have long been seen as a key conservation tool. Yet to know if and how the designation and management of protected areas affect the status of vulnerable habitats and species requires regular, ongoing monitoring of such areas. Forming a particular form of knowledge production related to an issue of great social and political concern, monitoring as such has nevertheless received comparatively little (conceptual) attention in science and technology studies (STS). In this presentation, I therefore explore how particular scientific and cultural readings of nature are tied together to shape monitoring as a knowledge practice in the context of Neusiedler See – Seewinkel National Park in Austria. I present ethnographic data on different ecosystem and species-based monitoring programs to demonstrate how these generate particular forms of ecological knowledge across temporal and spatial scales. I will argue that the calibration of monitoring practices at particular places and times with broader framings of biodiversity do not only produce matters of fact on conservation in the national park, but also generate more complex narratives on the interweaving of nature and culture that shapes biodiversity’.

New Book on an Ecological Village and Democratic Bureaucracy in China

Christof Lammer’s fine-grained ethnography describes the complexity of political processes in an eco-village in Sichuan. The usual pigeonholing of the Chinese state does not work here. An exciting read for anyone interested in how images of authoritarian, socialist and cultural otherness shape social policy and the transition to ecological agriculture.

Lammer, Christof. 2024. Performing State Boundaries: Food Networks, Democratic Bureaucracy and China. New York: Berghahn Books.

For his research, social anthropologist Christof Lammer lived for over a year in a village that was part of an alternative food network in Sichuan Province. The village had founded a cooperative to convert to ecological agriculture in the 2010s. This transition was initiated by Dong Jie. He was simultaneously valued as part of global civil society, esteemed part of rural community, and praised as a good state agronomist. This allowed him to secure the support of actors with different political ideas: organized urban middle-class consumers, activist scholars and the local government. Based on this observation, Christof develops an innovative approach to the anthropology of the state, which understands the performative boundary work between state, civil society, and family in its multiplicity and materiality.

One day during his stay in the eco-village, all existing minimum livelihood allowances in the county were suddenly canceled and citizens had to reapply for these benefits. This “standardization” was justified not only by “too much” kinship – “corruption” – but also by “too little” kinship and the supposed loss of traditional Chinese values ​​– “the lack of household responsibility”. While this standardization affected the lives of the former recipients, it offered Christof the rare opportunity to observe the democratic administration of the reapplication process. His ethnography shows how performative boundary work between state and kinship could turn similar practices into individualism, traditional familism or corruption and thus decided about access to the social benefits.

“This book is of interest not just to scholars studying China but more generally to social scientists, particularly to social anthropologists to whom it advocates the infusion of the political to the study of kinship. It is well organised and suitable for courses on the local state in the PRC and the anthropology of the state.”
Stephan Feuchtwang, London School of Economics and Political Science

“An excellent example of an ethnographically grounded theoretical work. It offers a useful and dense overview of the anthropology of the state, advances cutting-edge questions and counterbalances the Orientalist othering of China.”
Klāvs Sedlenieks, Rīga Stradiņš University

 

For upcoming book talks (also online!) please click here.

Thanks to the generous support of the University of Klagenfurt and its Department of Society, Knowledge and Politics, the entire book is available online (open access):

https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/LammerPerforming

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Christof Lammer is a social anthropologist based at the Department of Society, Knowledge and Politics, University of Klagenfurt, and a fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin’s Centre for Advanced Studies inherit – heritage in transformation. He has co-edited special issues on ‘Measuring Kinship: Gradual Belonging and Thresholds of Exclusion’ (2021, Social Analysis) and ‘Infrastructures of Value: New and Historical Materialities in Agriculture’ (2024, Ethnos). He is also a co-organizer of the Scientific Network ‘Anthropology and China(s)’ (2021–2025).

 

 

New Publication in Special Issue on Labour and Welfare in the Global South

In his contribution to this special issue of Global Social Policy, Christof Lammer examines social policy as a knowledge process and shows how the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao) in China and its relationship to labour changes not only through human actors’ intentions but through the sociotechnical materiality of bureaucratic targeting methods.

The relationship between labour and social policy is at the heart of the social question. Scholars often treat this link as either a causal relation out there or a conceptual connection in policy makers’ minds. This article examines its sociotechnical materiality instead. Christof Lammer follows political anthropologists who ask how bureaucrats practice policy and scholars of science and technology studies who explore how social and technical aspects are interrelated in knowledge processes.

China studies has suggested that the minimum livelihood guarantee (dibao) was originally designed as a market-oriented response to transformations of labour such as mass layoffs, peasant proletarianisation and associated unrest but later revamped to only combat extreme poverty – similar to earlier forms of social assistance during the Mao era. Ethnographic insights into dibao policy in a village in Sichuan show how its designed links to labour were erased and transformed through different methods of bureaucratic targeting, as well as expectations about the bureaucratic ability to know. For a time, dibao was even integrated into alternative rural development projects aimed at decommodification.

Studying social policy as a knowledge process uncovers how its sociotechnical links to labour reconfigure it as an answer to the social question.

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Lammer, Christof. 2024. „Social Policy as Knowledge Process: How Its Sociotechnical Links to Labour Reconfigure the Social Question.“ Global Social Policy 24(2): 166–184, https://doi.org/10.1177/14680181231210158.

Published in the Special Issue: “Reconfiguring Labour and Welfare in the Global South: How the Social Question is Framed as Market Participation”, edited by Minh Nguyen, Helle Rydstrom and Jingyu Mao.

Christof Lammer is a social anthropologist based at the Department of Society, Knowledge and Politics at the University of Klagenfurt. Currently he is a fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin’s Centre for Advanced Studies inherit – heritage in transformation.