Paulus Wagner is currently a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute Florence where he is also an Assistant Professor for Qualitative Methods. He holds a PhD from Science Po/ LIEPP where he focused in his research on citizen attitudes on social policy. In his dissertation, he is interested in ‚welfare chauvinism‘, a phenomenon linked to right-wing populist politics. Using a mixed methods approach, he conducted 150 biographical interviews with German and Austrian citizens, half of them manual workers by occupation, to analyse the genesis of these attitudes. Testing a theory on the relationship of populist attitudes to problems experienced especially by the working classes („modernization loser theory“), his thesis formulates the theory that in fact the genesis of welfare chauvinist attitudes is often linked to the experience of problems in the fields of work and contact with the welfare state. These problematic situations, in turn, are produced by the dynamics of social disintegration especially at the „meso“ level, i.e. within organisations and in the contact of organisations with citizens. During his PhD, Paulus did a research stay at the Department of Sociology of the University of California at Berkeley with Michael Burawoy and Arlie Russel-Hochschild. Before starting his PhD, he obtained a Master of Research in Social Sciences (with a specialisation in comparative development studies) at EHESS, Paris, a Master of Arts in International Political Economy at King’s College, London and a Bachelor of Arts in Translation and Interpretation from the University of Vienna and the Russian State University of Humanities in Moscow. Apart from his academic background, he has gained experience in other professional fields through internships in journalism (with DIE WELT in Berlin and ZDF in Vienna), diplomacy (in the Austrian Embassy in Zagreb, Croatia) and in the oil and gas industry (with OMV in Vienna).

Website: https://pauluswagner.com/

Barbara Wolfram is an Austrian film and theatre director as well as researcher. She holds a PhD from the Film Academy Vienna and a Master’s degree in Psychology from the University of Vienna (with a specialisation in test construction and educational psychology). In her PhD she was researching about on- and off-Screen representations of gender and diversity in Austrian feature films. Next to her quantitative research, Wolfram researches in two artistic research projects as an artistic-research PostDoc: She co-leads with Paulus Wagner a project on polarisation in societies (funded by Stadt Wien Kultur MA7): Building Bridges in Polarised Societies (2021 – 2025) and she also works on cinematic autosociobiographies in the PEEK project (FWF): Confronting Realities. Working on Cinematic Autosociobiographies (2021 – 2024). Wolfram has conducted international research, teaching and study stays at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, at ENS Louis Lumière, Paris, at HDK Valand Academy at University of Gothenburg/ Sweden and at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London.
In addition to her academic work, she is a theatre and film director and artistic director of the international theatre company .EVOLve, which she co-founded (including Volkstheater Wien, Schauspielhaus Wien) where she focuses on the artistic translation and fictionalisation of documentary work with groups in a collective approach. Additionally, Barbara Wolfram also podcasts about gender and diversity portrayal and representation in the podcast Ned wuascht – wir geh’n fisch’n together with Bianca J. Rauch and is politically activist active at KILL the TRAUERspiel, an initiative that works for more gender justice and diversity on Austrian stages.
Her work is characterized by an approach that combines artistic and scholarly perspectives, marked by a desire to find alternative formats for narratives’ development and fair representation.  

Website: https://barbarawolfram.com/