VALUE-VACC is now in in its second year – and we are currently a team of six!

In February, we took some time to reflect on our progress and ongoing research. For the multidisciplinary VALUE-VACC team, regular review meetings where we can exchange ideas, results and future collaborations are essential. The highlight of our first day was the release of our very own VALUE-VACC merch: a branded mug!

On the second day of our retreat, we focused on dissemination, collaborations and future paper projects. It was all about making commitments and brainstorming in which directions VALUE-VACC will develop.

We do not yet want to reveal too much but watch this space for news, events, and upcoming publications!

Katharina T. Paul and Nora Hansl were interviewed for one of the most read daily newspapers in Austria, Der Standard. The article written by Pia Kruckenhauser covers the current measles outbreak in Austria, and tries to unfold why parents decide to not vaccinate their children. As Paul and Hansl emphasize in the article the reason for not vaccinating one’s child is not only influenced by vaccine skepticism. But the structure of the public health system has a direct effect on it as well.

Link to the article: https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000208158/die-masernimpfung-wirkt-und-ist-sicher-warum-zoegern-eltern-trotzdem

At the beginning of November, we were delighted to welcome Dr Ellen Stewart from the University of Strathclyde at our department. Her stay was organized by VALUE VACC and CeSCoS (Center for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity).

During her stay, Dr Stewart gave an IPW lecture on her newest book “How Britain Loves the NHS” (Stewart, 2023). Colleagues from the department, students and other researchers came to listen to her interesting insights into the NHS and the “healthcare discrepancy”. She also held a Master Class with five early career researchers from various departments. Dr Stewart’s expertise in public health, and qualitative and participatory methods was widely appreciated. It was a pleasure for the whole VALUE VACC-Team, and we hope to welcome her again!

On September 7th, 2023, Anna Pichelstorfer successfully defended her PhD Thesis in Science and Technology Studies, entitled “(Re)Producing public issues: the co-production of assisted reproduction and democracy in Austria”. In her thesis, supervised by Prof. Ulrike Felt, she analyzed different practices of problematizing assisted reproductive technologies to show how those problematizations did not only define technologies in distinct ways but also enacted specific situated imaginaries and practices of doing democracy. It was a wonderful and joyful moment with colleagues, friends and family present! Anna can now officially start her role as a postdoc in the project VALUE-VACC.

Co-director of Centre for Health Policy, University of Strathclyde

On November 6, Dr Ellen Stewart is going to visit the Department of Political Science. She will give an invited lecture in the lecture series of the Department of Political Science (IPW lectures). The lecture is organized by the research group VALUE-VACC  (FWF – Austrian Science Fund START project, headed by Katharina T. Paul) in cooperation with CeSCoS (Centre for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity).

Topic: How Britain loves the NHS: solidarity and ‘the healthcare discrepancy’

Date: November 6, 17:00

Location: Conference Room (Neues Institutsgebäude, Universitätsstr. 7, 2nd floor, Trakt A, University of Vienna, Department of Political Science)

Quantitative studies of public opinion have argued that there is a ‘healthcare discrepancy’ (Bambra, 2005) in public attitudes to welfare state spending: population attitudes towards spending on healthcare diverge from those towards other welfare state functions. This is attributed to factors including the socio-cultural status of medicine in societies, and to the less stigmatised character of ill-health compared to conditions such as poverty or unemployment. In How Britain Loves the NHS (Stewart, 2023) I offer an analysis of this phenomenon in the UK context, where the socio-cultural significance of the NHS has grown sharply in recent years. This is often seen as problematic because the NHS becomes a proxy for exclusionary nationalist sentiment (Fitzgerald, Hinterberger, Narayan, & Williams, 2020), but also because public support for the NHS might encourage politicians to protect NHS budgets at the expense of other public services which might prevent ill-health. This paper discusses not how much the British public loves the NHS, but the modalities and dimensions of that affection. I consider how public affection for the NHS might be conceptualised, not as a vampiric threat to the wider welfare state, but as a valuable exemplar of how public services might act as solidarity-generating machines within society.

Our brilliant VALUE-VACC team member Paula-Marie Pucker has just produced a TV documentary for Austrian public television (ORF). The documentary explores the anthroposophy movement and the role of industry actors in its promotion. It is titled “Das Hokuspokus-Marketing Was steckt hinter Weleda, Dr. Hauschka & Co?”. With her exceptional investigative skills, Paula explores questions such as: what role does the cosmetic industry play in promoting the anthroposophy movement and how what cultural and economic values shape their current market position?

From June 19th until June 23rd, Nora Hansl participated in the Radboud Summer School in Nijmegen, Netherlands. This event was co-hosted with MethodsNET and offers various specialized courses on methodological approaches.

As part of the preparation for the upcoming fieldwork, Nora joined Mathilde Cecchini’s course on “Ethnography and Fieldwork”. This provided her with valuable hands-on information and offered the opportunity to discuss and debate with other (junior) researchers from all around the globe.

During the intensive and exciting week of Summer School, Nora also successfully passed the (online) Public Presentation at the Faculty (FÖP), which has to be undergone in the first six to nine months of one’s PhD.

Now, she is a full member of the Vienna Doctoral School of Social Sciences as well as fully prepared and looking forward to the upcoming fieldwork!

On May 22, Dmitrii Zhikharevich presented a paper in progress, “Patricians and Careerists: A Prosopography of Early U.S. Venture Capitalists,1945-1970,” stemming from his Ph.D. thesis, at the History and Theory of Capitalism Workshop, University of Chicago. Based on a collection of oral history and archival sources, this paper reconstructs the “collective biography” of the first generation of post-war venture capitalists in the U.S., highlighting their middle-class social origins and hierarchical career mobility. The paper shows how their employment in formal financial institutions and participation in the intra-organizational divisions of labor and knowledge influenced their entry to the emergent VC industry.

On 2 June, Dmitrii attended the 7th Interdisciplinary Market Studies Workshop and presented a paper “How to make sense of algorithms when they make no sense: the role of interpretative labor,” co-authored with Vassily Pigounides (CNAM). Based on ethnographic fieldwork and multiple correspondence analysis, this paper analyzes the division of labor in an AI startup using David Graeber’s notion of interpretative labor.

On June 13, Dmitrii participated in the symposium “Technology and Democracy” at the Centre for the Study of the United States, Tel Aviv University, and presented another paper stemming from his Ph.D. thesis, “Towards a Genealogy of Technical Entrepreneurship, 1958-1970.” Drawing on Ian Hacking’s concept of “human kinds,” it shows how the category of “technical” or “technological” entrepreneur, understood as a specific kind of person, emerged in the postwar debates on how to best manage scientists and engineers working in industrial research labs.

Finally, we also just received ethics approval from the University of Vienna research ethics commission and are now beginning to adjust our sampling strategy and preparing for recruitment of interview partners. So VALUE-VACC seems to be in full swing indeed and we are all very excited about this next phase!