the ifk

In the course of its annual meeting the ifk International Advisory Board (IAB) reviews applications and selects senior and research fellows for the upcoming academic year. The board assists and consults with ifk management in the design and implementation of a distinguished academic program.

• Chairman: Prof. Dr. Andreas Beyer, University of Basel (Department of Art History)
• Prof. Dr. Cornelius Borck, University of Lübeck (Institute of Medical History and Science Research)
• Prof. Dr. Monika Dommann, University of Zurich (Department of History)
• Prof. Dr. Heike Klippel, Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig (Media Studies)
• Prof. Dr. Schamma Schahadat, University of Tübingen (Slavic Seminar)
• Prof. Dr. Elisabeth Timm, University of Münster (Institute for Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology)
• Prof. Dr. Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (Sociology/Gender Studies)
• Prof. Dr. Marie-Luise Angerer ✝, University of Postdam and FH Postsdam (Department of Art and Media)
• Honorary chairman: Prof. Dr. Carl E. Schorske PhD (1915-2015)

The tasks of the ifk executive board include: advising the ifk rectorate and management, nominating members of the selection committee for the appointment of the institute director, issuing assessments for the appointment of members of the international scientific advisory board (IAB) and quality assurance by way of evaluation of the center’s activities.

• Univ. Prof. Dr. Helmut Konrad PhD (former rector of the Karl Franzens University of Graz and member of the board of the “European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education” ENQA since 2004.)
• Univ. Prof.in Dr.in Christina Lutter PhD (Professor of Austrian history at the University of Vienna)
• Mag.a Pauline Seidermann MA (Member of the board of directors at Voestalpine Steel Division)
• Univ. Prof. Dr. Gerhard Widmer PhD (Member of the board of directors at the Institute for Computational Perception at Johannes Kepler University Linz, winner of the Wittgenstein Prize 2009, ERC Advanced Grant 2015)

The institutional and programmatic origins of the University of Art and Design Linz (Kunstuniversität) can be traced back to the Linz Art School, founded in 1947, which was awarded college status in 1973 and subsequently became a university in 1998.

The founding of the organization was steeped in a conscious cultural and political rejection of the National Socialist era. This stance was particularly characterized by an emphasis on the basic freedoms of art and research, the recognition of modern and contemporary art, and the positioning of the new institute between the poles of free artistic and applied commercial design. These values remain the basis of the fundamental self-perception of the University of Art and Design Linz.

The university has been a legal entity under public law according to the new University Law of 2002 since January 1, 2004, and thus operates fairly autonomously. The University of Art and Design Linz comprises four inter-related institutes: Fine Art and Cultural Studies, Art and Education, Media, and Space and Design. There are also three centers, of which the IFK in Vienna is one. As an art university the University of Art and Design Linz provides small study courses with an entrance examination and intensive supervision. The total enrollment for winter semester 2015/16 was 1,368.

University Council
The university council authorizes the development plan, the organizational plan, the drafting of the university performance agreement, and the rules of procedures for the rector’s office. It approves or rejects applications for the position of rector via the senate. Alongside the vice rectors the university council elects the rector from the three candidates selected by the senate and on the basis on the rector’s proposal and approval of the senate.

Rector’s Office
The rector’s office manages the university and serves as its representative it in the public sphere. The rector’s office of the University of Art and Design Linz currently comprises a full-time rector and three vice rectors.

Rector: Mag.iur. Brigitte Hütter, MSc
Vice Rector for Finances: Mag.rer.soc.oec. Erik Aigner, MBA
Vice Rector for Research: Mag. Dr. Andre Zogholy
Vice Rector for Art and Teaching: Univ.-Prof. Mag.art. Brigitte Vasicek

Senate
Alongside the rector’s office and the university council, the senate functions as the management committee of the University of Art and Design Linz. This body comprises representatives of university professors, scientific and artistic non-professorial staff, general university staff, and students.

In the early 1990s, the then coalition government of SPÖ and ÖVP – with Erhard Busek as Science Minister – made an executive agreement to establish a center for interdisciplinary research in the humanities.

The center for interdisciplinary research in humanities was thereafter launched under the leadership of Professor Moritz Csáky as the ifk International Research Center for Cultural Studies. Founded as an association in 1992, it began full operation in 1993 at Danhausergasse 1 in Vienna’s 4th district.

The founding directorate, which consisted of professor Moritz Csáky, professor Helga Nowotny, professor Dieter A. Binder and professor Manfred Wagner, as well as Dr. Lutz Musner as academic coordinator. Over the course of the next three years, they established an organizational structure for an international and interdisciplinary scholarly lecture course dedicated to interdisciplinary studies in the field of culture.

The primary function of the institution was the provision of an infrastructure for international guest researchers chosen by a scientific advisory board, and the organization of public conferences, workshops, and lectures.

The early focus was on themes such as »Cultural Plurality in Central Europe«,»Academic Research« and »History of Art and Cultural History.« In keeping with this, some of the first high-profile researchers that were invited included Edward Timms (Karl Kraus), Jean-Pierre Cometti (Ludwig Wittgenstein), and Jacques Le Rider (Viennese Fin-de-Siècle).

In 1996, Professor Gotthart Wunberg (Tübingen) was appointed as the first director and it was under his aegis that, among other things, the Junior Fellowship Program for Austrian doctoral candidates was introduced.

The successful point of emphasis was the exploration of historical and collective memories. An international advisory board, consisting of renowned scholars such as Aleida Assmann, Lorraine Daston, and Carl E. Schorske chose fellows from the numerous international applications who had submitted thematically-appropriate projects.

The next two points of emphasis were »Metropoles in Change – the Modern City as an Object of Cultural Studies« and the »History of Cultural Studies.« The selection of Senior and Research Fellows were chosen by the International Advisory Board (IAB) not on the basis of their project’s relation to the current chosen themes but rather on the quality of their applications.

Previous to winter semester 1997/1998 ifk Junior Fellowships had been limited to only a few months, thereafter junior fellows were invited to stay for a full academic year. Despite the limited space at the Danhausergasse site, four PhD students could work on their dissertation at the Centre projects simultaneously.

With the relocation to the present location at Reichsratsstraße 17, 1010 Vienna, the number of Junior Fellow positions was increased to eight. A further ten positions became available for Senior and Research Fellows, which alternate each semester.

The new location also makes it possible to hold regular working seminars for the discussion of current issues and methods in the cultural studies with all fellows in attendance. We were also able to extend the event program to around thirty lectures and eight to ten international conferences and workshops per year.

Gotthart Wunberg’s successor Professor Hans Belting (Karlsruhe) placed new emphasis on interdisciplinary art and visual studies, and launched the theme »Cultures of Vision.« As a result of these innovations IFK’s mainly historical, literary and cultural studies were successfully expand in the direction of media and visual studies.

In 2007 Germanist Professor Helmut Lethen (Rostock) became the new director of the ifk. During this time a number of new themes were developed and internationally advertised, some of these included: »Cultures of Evidence. The Reality of Cultural Studies,« »The Cultural Paradoxes of Globalisation,« »Lost Certainties – Living Worlds and Knowledge in Transition« and »Imaginations of Disorder.«

Thanks to the support of the BMWF, the ifk was able to finance an international fellowship program for the Junior Fellows following their stay at the ifk as well annual summer academies for young scholars beginning in the 2000s.

In addition to developing innovative research approaches for the interdisciplinary study of culture, a second important focus for the ifk is the promotion of young researchers, and during this time this was sustainably expanded and qualitatively improved. Our annual career surveys evidence the success of ifk »graduates« in their chosen career paths in the fields of science and culture.

Helmut Lethen not only intensified the exchange of the fellows within the internal seminars that had been initiated by Gotthart Wunberg, but also pushed forward with the promotion of future generations, introducing the dissertation workshops in which Junior Fellows present and discuss an exemplary chapter of their doctoral thesis with their ifk colleagues.

The spacious kitchen at the new location Reichsratsstrasse provided another much appreciated forum for exchange. This soon became the center of informal communication for Junior, Research and Senior Fellows, a hearth for new scientific ideas and contacts.

In addition to the renowned guest researchers and innovative projects presented by Junior Fellows, the proximity of the new location to the humanities and social science departments of the University of Vienna resulted in a jump in ifk events visitors.

Throughout these years the IFK Board continued to play an significant role in, among other things, the appointment of the international advisory board members and in the tendering and/or appointment of the center directors.

The central of the executive board was demonstrated when, in 2010, the future fate of the ifk was uncertain and subject to government decree.

The Minister of Education at that time had ordered the cessation of funding for non-university affiliated research facilities. In light of the indignation and the subsequent mobilization of domestic and foreign researchers, and thanks to the foresight of Reinhard Kannonier who fought for the integration of the ifk into the University of Art and Design Linz, the existence of the ifk at the Vienna location was secured.

Since January of 2015, after a four-year transitional phase, the ifk is a full-fledged center of the Kunstuniversität (University of the Arts) Linz and can continue its work in Vienna.

The affiliation to the university structure came with several fundamental changes in the administration and to the technological infrastructure, the academic independence and method of the ifk, however, remained unchanged.

The international academic advisory board pursues its work as before, and the former supporting association was transformed into a friends’ association: »The Association of Friends of the ifk.« The fellowships and event program follow the earlier, well-tried structure.

The innovative and dynamic University of the Arts, with its internationally renowned faculty in the departments of cultural studies and art history, opens exciting new perspectives for the ifk.

The University of the Arts’ three axes of research are as follows: art – contemporary and emerging, post-digital cultures, sustainable and critical design, transformative research and academic formation. Collaboration with Ars Electronica Center exists on several levels; the VALIE EXPORT Center – where the life works of the artist are appraised and research on feminist media art is promoted – is operated together with the Lentos Kunstmuseum.

The artistic and creative institutes in Linz gather contemporary art, new media, design and theoretical reflections to 21st century phenomena. They benefit from unconstrained exchanges with the international »research satellite« in Wien, as the ifk equally benefits from the inspiring mother ship, further upstream along the Danube.

Already since 2012, in its rooms, the ifk has been presenting annual exhibitions that comprise work of students or graduates of the University of the Arts in the format »ifk ART«. This collaboration now extends to joint calls for artworks with the alumni association and its exhibition format »forum presents«.

With Professor Thomas Macho (Berlin), a native of Vienna took on the leadership of the ifk for the first time in March 2016. For more than two decades, Macho had already shaped cultural studies as an independent field in the German-speaking region. He achieved this as professor for cultural studies at Humboldt University’s Institute for Cultural Studies as well as through the founding of the Helmholtz Center for cultural technology. As an experienced curator of art exhibitions, he also guides the relationship with the University of the Arts into a new phase.

Since his appointment as director, the emphases of research »Cultures of translation« and »Alternative Work« have inspired junior as well as internationally established researchers in their work on projects within cultural studies. In the meantime, »Situated in the Global« has been added as a third possible emphase of research.

In the coming years, the focus will remain on the unhurried, cultural-studies-oriented work and interdisciplinary exchange of the ifk Fellows. With Karin Harrasser, who has been director since March 2025, the substantive focus is on further developing two areas of research: First, in light of continuing inequality and neocolonial tendencies, it is imperative to think beyond Europe when considering internationality and to engage more intensively with the intellectual cultures of the so-called Global South. Second, the exchange with the arts—initiated some time ago through the affiliation with the University of Art and Design Linz—will continue to be cultivated.

Following an expansion and renovation, all lectures, conferences, exhibitions, and workshops have been taking place at the ifk Arkade—the ground-floor spaces at Reichsratsstraße 17—since the summer semester of 2024.

»The Last Things Before the Last« was the subtitle of Siegfried Kracauer’s posthumously published book on historiography. The ifk is now drawing on it to ask questions about the end, or rather, about ending. These questions are particularly pressing in view of the ingrained production and consumption habits that threaten our continued existence on the planet. This concerns mobility and energy consumption, i.e., the technical and economic possibilities that are unevenly distributed worldwide. It concerns everyday routines: what we eat, how we dress, how we communicate. It thus questions our ingrained ways of life as well as their epistemic and habitualized foundations. The question of what we must, can, and want to stop doing so that the so-called Anthropocene will have been a phase or a crisis is an eminently political one, especially since ending something could have given rise to a necessary new beginning. From a cultural-historical perspective, beginnings are systematically linked to gestures of recourse, exemplified by the European Renaissance, but also by current rewilding projects. Even ruderal plants, which colonize destroyed areas, use what is already there.

Populists promise their voters that they can continue as before and fundamentally dismiss those who talk about stopping, reducing, post-growth, and renunciation as enemies of individual freedom. The proposed research focus counters this and aims to examine cultural techniques, practices, modes of thinking, and narratives of ending and cessation in such a way that ending, dealing with the end, and finitude can be understood as active and malleable and appear on the horizon of a new beginning.

Questions that address different cultural studies disciplines will be examined in the form of conferences and workshops:

1. Who proclaims the end? The end of history, the end of the world, the end of humanity—time horizons are stretched out theoretically, historiographically, artistically, and literarily, and they have repercussions on how we view the present. How the aftermath is conceived or desired is not insignificant in this context. Are the present and its crises perceived as inevitable or as historically contingent? What does this imply for imaginations of the future? What trajectories and futures are conceivable if shifting time horizons are assumed? How can an open future that incorporates the end be achieved?

2. After the end: Isn’t it time to consider the end from beyond the threshold? Haven’t many worlds already ended—through war or colonial conquests, for example—as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski argue? This is the starting point for investigations into post-apocalyptic models of thinking, but also for cultural anthropological and cultural studies research into existential thresholds, such as cultural techniques of mourning, ancestor worship, genealogy, and questions of reparation and restitution.

3. Post-growth and conviviality: The discourse on the finiteness of resources and global inequality as the price of economic growth in privileged zones began in the 1970s with thinkers such as Ivan Illich, who pointed to the self-destructive dynamics of industrial modernity with his concept of counterproductivity. However, degrowth, with its connotations of renunciation and loss, now has a distinctly apocalyptic flavor. How, on the other hand, could breaking with destructive economic routines and practices be conceived as a step toward conviviality? Political economy offers initial approaches to this question, particularly those of the so-called Global South.

4. Endings that are beginnings: In the arts, the »paradoxes of the final« (Peter Bexte) are consistently addressed, tested, and shaped. The fact that every ending (of a novel, a piece of music or theater, a film) could also be a beginning seems to be the signature of modernity. Unlike in cyclical conceptions of time, breaks are crucial for modernity: they separate the old from the new, the outdated from the promising, and thus also define contemporaneity. Conceivable here are art-historical or literary-historical or theoretical investigations of the arts of ending, including in film or theater, or—more forcefully—in digital media with their acceleration of obsolescence.

It can no longer be denied that the tremendous mobilization of people, objects, and nature, which came with the modern age, constitutes one of the greatest challenges of present day, but perhaps one of its greatest enigmas as well. The capitalization and mobilization of resources is an enigma to us because the resulting destructive forces are now unmistakable, and because a post-growth world has also already been roughly outlined, while the path leading to it is not yet carved out, or must be imagined as politically extremely grievous. From a socio-economic perspective it is argued that such a »de-mobilization« could only be achieved with the help of fundamental economic and cultural transformations, which furthermore shakes the self-image of the liberal bourgeois middle class. Right wing populism and nationalism are the already perceivable symptoms of this uncertainty.

However, from a historical perspective, globalization is neither a spatially homogeneous nor a temporally continuous phenomenon. The effects of global interactions always come into play locally, thus, in a sense, they are glocal. Even the most mobile elements, above all the financial markets, are related to circumstanced cultural and economic practices. Costs and benefits continue to be unevenly distributed to the highest degree. Since the modern era’s wave of colonization starting in the 16th century, the most salient phases include: phases of expansion (military campaigns, trade, missionary work), of recentering (for example through imperial concentrations of influence), and also of de-globalization (following market collapses for instance). These effects concern processes of the economic and geopolitical order, but also concern cultural processes (language policy, political discourses of nationalization, etc.)

Virtually all current political problem constellations are related to these interactions. Whether the topic is asylum policy, security policy, disease control, climate policy: none of these topics are conceivable without considering the long history of globalization in specific places. For some time now, it has not only been a matter of making mobility technologically and culturally more sustainable, but also of actively committing to the possibility of dwelling: people and animals are to be protected from forced displacement; if they must flee, their subsequent arrival is to be facilitated. How do these conditions change our perspectives on mobility? How do our perspectives on the global transportation of goods change based on these conditions? The same question is to be asked pertaining to »indigenousness«, belonging, imputability, the relationship between biopolitics and mobility, it is to be asked of technologies, processes of design, and infrastructures. Which languages will a future glocal world literature speak? How can vulnerability, now primarily an effect of disparity, become an anchorage for self-restriction and shared care? Which roles will gender, sexuality and corporality, wage and care work play in the transition to and within a post-growth world? Epistemically and within the realm of lived experience, which time regimes and conceptions of time, of beginning and end, of duration and velocity, will assert themselves or will prevail? Which concepts can grasp these complex processes without implying a false consensus or a new teleology?

The research emphasis Situated in the Global pursues such questions and similar ones in an explorative and interdisciplinary manner. Historical and cultural constellations and conjunctures are to be examined through sounding of great depth and lateral perspectives from the margins.

Furthermore, we aim to establish a research field under the title Different Work. This topic is intended to serve as an invitation to applicants who are critically confronting current sociopolitical, technological, and economic developments in the world of work. In the future, we will most likely be required to undertake different configurations of labor, an expectation that is associated with both fears and utopian aspirations. Even the »we« here remains vague. Who belongs to this »we«? In which countries and cultures? Men or women? Children or elders? Poor or rich?

The spectrum of possible projects is wide. Different Work: The title refers to transformations in the world of work, some of which had already been described and imagined, such as the reorganization of postindustrial societies into service societies or the increasing subjectivation of work biographies expressed in terms of »Ich-AGs« (Me PLC’s) or the »entrepreneurial self« (Ulrich Bröckling). Different Work also relates to debates concerning technological perspectives—keywords: digitization, automation, artificial intelligence. Accordingly, the German Federal Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs opened in October of 2018 a »Denkfabrik Digitale Arbeitsgesellschaft« (Think Tank of the Digital Working Society). This begs the question of whether and how »working societies« will actually persist. Rather, will the prophecy of the economist John Maynard Keynes, who in the summer of 1930 predicted that in 2030 we would spend only fifteen hours per week on work, be fulfilled? Similar utopias have also been formulated by Benjamin Franklin, Karl Marx, and John Stuart Mill. How will alternatives to our current concept of work take shape? How will ideas of leisure, vacation, and consumption find new definitions?

What would the cultures and economic orders of an age of leisure look like? Do we need to consider a »salvation of work«  (Lisa Herzog) or the introduction of unconditional basic income (Rutger Bregman)? Would such a basic income, whatever it might be called, contribute to processes of renationalization or, instead, to other forms of globalization, such as strengthening worldwide institutions? A further pertinent question for an art university concerns the interfaces arising between new forms of work—such as the much-discussed start-ups, new work organizations, and platform economies—and modes of artistic practice. What will future workplaces look like? What kinds of architecture will become predominant in this regard? Offices, factories, plantations, mines, laboratories, workshops?

By no means is it inconsequential that the concept of creativity has flourished for decades not merely as a programmatic idea for the arts, but more acutely as an economic imperative. In contrast to the creative industries, »bullshit jobs« (David Graeber) also are also proliferating: activities that are totally useless and meaningless according to the perception of the respective actors. Are we confronted today, as we likely will be ever more in the future, with social upheavals and fault lines that no longer relate merely to the growing differences between rich and poor, but also to the meaning and value of work itself? And what kinds of work—for example, housework or care services—will be included in future calculations of gross domestic products? What significance will be given to voluntary work, which is often discussed in German under the absurd title of the »Ehrenamt« (honorary appointment)?

Different Work: all of the themes above are entwined with the question of the cultural forms of work. Our capitalist work ethic is quite a new phenomenon: Max Weber famously associated it with the rise of a Puritan-Calvinistic morality. Which ideas will possibly take its place? And what pictures and narratives will we use in describing its alternatives? Recently, the French anthropologist Marc Augé, in his manifesto on »L’Avenir des Terriens« (The Future of Earthlings, 2016), designated the »utopia of education for all« the »only utopia that matters for the centuries to come, the foundations of which must be established and secured with utmost urgency.«[1] The demand sounds a bit like »lifelong learning«. What other forms of cultural meaning making could assert themselves and prevail after the »disappearance of religions,« which Augé also considers probable?

[1] Marc Augé: Die Zukunft der Erdbewohner. Ein Manifest. Translated by Daniel Fastner. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz 2019. S. 21.

Association purpose according to statutes:
»The purpose of the association, whose activities are non-profit, is to promote interdisciplinary research as well as postgraduate training of young scholars in the field of cultural studies, and for this purpose supports a research center.«

Association Board:
Chairwoman: Dipl.-Kfm. Wilhelmine Goldmann
Vice Chairman: Dr. Ingo Zechner
Treasurer: Dr. Manfred Pittioni
Prof. Dr. Moritz Csáky
Prof. Dr. Gabriella Hauch
Mag. Dr. Günther Sandner

Auditors:
Dr. Harald Fiedler
HRi.R. Hon.-Prof. Dr. Lorenz Mikoletzky

Managing Director:
Mag.a Viola Eichberger

Postal address:
Reichsratsstraße 17/DG
1010 Vienna
Austria

Contact:
friends@ifk.ac.at
+43 664 524 81 92

ZVR number: 519811694