Research
Information on research areas of our departments
The Vienna-based Department of Applied Sociology of Law and Criminology (IRKS) is one of Europe's leading departments in security research. Having been founded as a non-university research facility in 1973, the department became part of the Faculty of social and Political Sciences at the University of Innsbruck in March 2021.
Our interdisciplinary team conducts research on security, crime, violence and extremism, legal norms, social control and social work. In addition, our studies accompany the implementation of measures and laws and record the effects of social and legal interventions with a diverse and elaborate range of methods. Based on our scientific findings, we are able to pursue our main aim, which is to strengthen the rule of law, social security and the social participation of a diverse group of stakeholders.
Research at the Department of Media, Society and Communication is characterized by an approach that integrates social, media and cultural studies. Basic research-oriented, media-theoretical, social scientific and cultural-historical reflections are applied and methodological and media-practical skills are provided and taught. The research activities are focused on three work areas as follows:
- Research area Socio-Cultural Aspects of Media and Communication
- Research area Media and Communication Studies with a Focus on Democracy
- Research area Media Education and Philosophy of Science
The Department of Political Science comprises ten research areas that are integrated into various research centres and research platforms within the research focus system-framework at the University of Innsbruck. Inform yourself about the thematic orientation of our research areas here:
- Empirical Gender Studies
- European Integration and European Regional Cooperation
- International Relations
- Methodology and Methods in Political Science
- Civic Education
- Political Communication and Media
- Political Economy
- Political Theory
- Comparative Politics
- Science Policy Studies and Science Communication
The researchers at the Department of Sociology stand for a theoretically diverse and methodologically integrative approach to social science research. The thematic cross-sectional areas at the Institute are:
- Supply
- Livelihoods
- Markets
- social Inequality
- Knowledge and value systems
Researchers at the department work on these and other questions in the aforementioned cross-sectional areas from the perspectives of sociology of work, organizational and economic sociology, agricultural and regional sociology, sociology of consumption, sociology of aging, sociology of religion, sociology of higher education, political sociology, and sociological theory.
Research at the department is carried out in teams and in individual work under the premise of openness to different - qualitative and quantitative - methods, against the background of a broad and historically epistemologically guided access to the theories of our subject and with the goal of an object-adequate, scientifically and socially relevant publication culture.