Housing Studies, Council Housing as Social Urban Infrastructure, Migration and Urbanism, Sociological Methodology and Methods, Urban Social Movements

Short Biography

Julia Edthofer studied sociology at the University of Vienna, the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and completed the post-graduate programme „Comparative Sociology“ at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Vienna. From 2018-21 she worked as university assistant at the Research Unit Sociology, since September 2022 she is a post doc researcher financed by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF: ESPRIT-programme) and works on social and council housing as urban infrastructure.  

Julia’s research interests encompass housing studies with focus on council housing as urban infrastructure, as well as housing and living in older age. Furthermore, she worked on migration processes as part of contemporary urbanism, on urban social movements and on the research on racism and anti-Semitism. She is specialized in qualitative methods with focus on socio-spatial analyses and participative-dialogical approaches. In her current research, she triangulates biographical approaches with social area analyses. In her intergenerational project on peripheral and post-industrial council housing in Vienna, she examines the role of housing as social infrastructure from a gendered perspective. She interviews women from two different generations (70 years+ and 35 years+) on their experiences to balance paid work and care work and asks for the role of council housing regarding the provision of adequate care-infrastructure.

Apart from housing research, Julia focuses on space acquisition and space constitution as everyday urban practice. She worked extensively on gendered space appropriation, as well as on marginalization-processes in public and semi-public space(s). With regard to migration and the urban space, she worked on multilingual urban landscapes from the perspective of Viennese adolescents.

Research Areas

  • Housing Studies: social and council housing, ageing and living, caring communities
  • Migration and Urbanism: intersectional perspectives on space appropriation and space production, migration and urbanity, socio-spatial inequalities
  • Methods of Empirical Social Research: qualitative analysis, participative methods and dialogical research
  • Urban Social Movements: autonomous space production, urban protest cultures