Katharina T. Paul, PhD

In June 2021, I was awarded a START Prize by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). The project is titled Valuing Vaccination: A multi-sited policy valuography. I will be starting this project with a fantastic team in late 2022 – please get in touch if you want to learn more!

We have just published a blog post in German discussing early results of our interview study – available here. This forms part of a collection of scientific blog posts hosted by the Vienna Center for Electoral Research in the context of the Austrian Corona Panel Project.

Barbara Prainsack and Katharina Kieslich have developed a project (“SolPan”) exploring the experience of COVID-19 and how and why citizens react in particular ways to current policy measures. Does COVID-19 generate pro-social (solidaristic) behaviour and what does it mean for politicians to instrumentally employ the notion of solidarity? I have just joined a team of researchers on this project and have been conducting online and telephone interviews in this context. Katharina Kieslich and I have also recently written a short blog piece for the University of Vienna, questioning what solidarity could mean under current conditions. You will find more information on SolPan (in German) here.

This event brought together scholars researching public health and diplomacies in interdisciplinary panels, mingling factions from across the social sciences (political science, international relations, anthropology and STS) and humanities (history of medicine, science and technology), covering cases such as antimicrobial resistance, vaccination, and diagnostic technologies for newly emerging diseases. The event built on an ongoing collaboration with SONAR GLOBAL, an EU project that mobilizes social sciences against infectious threats and featured a brilliant keynote by Prof Stefan Elbe (University of Sussex).

Serving as a bridge between theory and practice, the workshop featured a roundtable discussion with Dr Reinhild Strauss of the Austrian Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs, Health, and Consumer Protection and Dr Michaela Told, a global health diplomacy consultant and instructor, as well as InsSciDE’s coordinator and President of the Historical Committee of Inserm (From Science to Health) Pascal Griset. This roundtable particularly helped in identifying changes and continuities in health diplomacy, and also displayed the different temporalities that shape sanitary actions – the comparison between long-term antimicrobial stewardship and short term sanitary measures in the current case of COVID-19 (a new variant of the Corona Virus) was particularly insightful for both academics and practitioners.

Curious about who was there? Click here to view the program.

I am super excited to visit the Tilburg Institute for Law Technology, and Society (TILT) at Tilburg University in March 2020. I will be conducting research for my FWF-funded project KNOW-VACC and working on my habilitation thesis. Ik kijk ernaar uit!

Very excited that our panel has just been accepted for the 4S/EASST conference to take place in Prague in August 2020. Based on ongoing research and working towards a problematisation of dominant concepts of value, Katharina Kieslich (U. of Vienna), Saheli Datta Burton (King’s College), Barbara Prainsack and Gabby Samuels (King’s College) invite both conceptual and empirical papers on the subject of value, and encourage speakers to reflect on the impact of their research on policy and practice. Paper submission opens 16 December!

Together with Christian Haddad at the Austrian Institute of International Affairs (oiip), I organised a visit by Prof. Stefan Elbe (University of Sussex) in Vienna this month.  In his talk on 25 September at the Austrian Institute of International Affairs, Stefan Elbe talked about changing concepts of health and security, the politics of technological innovation, and new forms of diplomacy that (re)shape global health and international relations in the 21st century. A great chance for Anna Pichelstorfer and me to discuss our work on health diplomacy.

The German Ethics Council (Deutscher Ethikrat) is currently considering the ethical dimensions of vaccine mandates in light of decreasing vaccination rates in Germany. To this effect, the Ethics Council consulted three experts on February 21 in Berlin at a public meeting held at the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. You can find transcripts and my presentation materials here. 

Our workshop on “ignorance and non-knowledge” November 13 – 14, 2018 was a real highlight for me this year – and a great success with so many wonderful scholars from different disciplines and places. We will make the keynote by Linsey McGoey (Essex) available soon on the department’s webstream, Matthias Gross (Jena), Stefan Böschen (Aachen), and Ulrike Felt (Vienna).
Workshop programme