Page 53 – University of Klagenfurt

Marietta Blau-Grant for Julia Malik researcher to do fieldwork in Colombia

PhD candidate and university assistant Julia Malik has been awarded a Marietta Blau-Grant by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research (BMBWF). This scholarship supports her field research in Colombia for her doctoral project, ‘Classifying Citizens, Updating the State: How Practicing Digital Welfare Shapes Statehood in Colombia’.

The grant helps highly qualified PhD students to optimize their doctoral thesis through a long-term stay abroad. Thanks to the scholarship, Julia Malik is able to go to Colombia for twelve months to continue her fieldwork and connect with researchers at the Universidad del Rosario in Bogotá. This will significantly advance her PhD project dealing with the interplay of digitalization, welfare, and the state.

In her dissertation, Julia Malik focuses on a digital classification and information system used by the Colombian state to manage welfare, asking how practices and materialities of digitalized welfare form the state. During the scholarship stay, she will apply ethnographic research methods to explore how this digital welfare infrastructure is sociotechnically enacted in various ways. Further, she will investigate how technologies and practices around this digital welfare infrastructure configure the state, thus shaping bureaucracy, social policy, welfare delivery, and governmental knowledge. Moving beyond common assumptions about digitalization and the frequent focus on its consequences for citizens, Julia Malik attends to digitalization’s manifold, ambivalent, and unexpected effects and their intertwinements with non-digital processes. Conceptualizing digitalization as multiplicity produced through socio-material practices, her dissertation project enriches STS debates on the digitalization of the state.

Life-saving knowledge: New technology sifts through surgical videos

Most endoscopic operations generate videos that are of interest to other surgeons. How were difficulties overcome? What worked well, what didn’t? At what point did preventable mistakes occur? Answers to these questions can be life-saving for the person on the operating table. Researchers at the University of Klagenfurt are working on making huge pools of surgical videos easier to sift through, so that both future surgeons and seasoned surgical staff can learn from them more effectively.

Register now! Cross-curricular courses at doctoral level

Do you already know the cross-curricular course offer at doctoral level for the academic year 2023/24? Registration for the courses is open as of today!

Moving out at 18 and then dealing with life by yourself? New project examines the importance of family for care leavers

Care leavers – these are young people who grow up outside the family in child and youth welfare care and who embark on the path to adulthood from there – often experience the transition to independence at the age of 18 as very abrupt. While other young adults can usually count on the support of their family for many years to come, many care leavers often find themselves alone. A research project is investigating the role of the family and social networks in the transition to adulthood. Researchers are currently analysing initial data from the interviews.