Brown Bag Lunch

11.12.2024, 12.00am-1.30pm

Petr Kodenko Kubala is a Visiting Scholar at the Institute of European Ethnology at the University of Vienna. His research draws on Actor-Network Theory and the urban assemblages approach, exploring housing affordability crisis, sustainable housing, and collaborative housing practices. The primary objective of the research is to advance the understanding of the relationship between housing affordability and environmental sustainability. This will be achieved through an empirical examination of the socio-material infrastructures of "new social housing" (and particularly collaborative housing) in Vienna, as well as through theoretical rethinking of the concept of "housing crisis" within the context of the Anthropocene. The talk will outline the framework, aims, methodology and theory of the research project, offering an opportunity to discuss over lunch its potential theoretical and empirical contributions to the field

Besprechungsraum 4. Stock, Institut für Soziologie, 1010 Wien

27.11.2024, 1.00-2.30pm

Julia Wesely is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Urban Studies Research Group at the Department of Geography. Her research and teaching focuses on the intersections of environmental (in-)justice, learning and knowledge (co-) production in and across the urban global South and North.

There is growing scholarly attention to secondary and intermediary cities as their relevance for global urban development isincreasingly recognised. This talk examines debates on these cities through the notion of overlooked cities to understand how knowledge from such cities is produced and circulated in urban research and practice. Based on her work with the Overlooked Cities Collective, Julia illustrates how different people, places, and practices remain intentionally or unintentionally marginalised, off-the-map and under-theorised in global urban studies, and with what consequences.

Besprechungsraum 4. Stock, Institut für Soziologie, 1010 Wien

14.05.2024, 2-3.30pm

Paolo Graziano is Professor of Political Science at the University of Padua and Incoming Scholar at Urban Futures.

Over the past years, phenomena such as the Gilets Jaunes in France or the ecological vs. social disputes in industrial sites (e.g. the ILVA steel plant in Taranto) have fueled the debate on ecological and social concerns. They revealed a trade-off in terms of potentially conflicting policies, requiring the understanding of their various underlying preferences. The talk addresses the following questions: did the European Union take an 'eco-social' path? If so, how and why? By adopting a post-functionalist approach, it analyses the growing intertwining of social and environmental policies at the EU level and tries to explain its genesis by focusing on the role of the actors involved. The main argument is that the European Commission, and in particular the President of the Commission, developed an eco-social agenda to strengthen legitimation.

Laura Lotteraner is PhD candidate at the Research Platform The Challenges of Urban Futures at the University of Vienna.

The talk will give insights into research at the intersection of environmental pollution science and data analysis. It presents case studies at different steps of the anthropogenic water system, discusses the collaboration between data scientists and pollution scientists and explores how the use of data can be improved in the field of environmental pollution.