Univ. Ass. Mag. Dr. Katharina Hajek
Photo source: Irene Graf Fotografie.
Univ. Ass. Mag. Dr. Katharina Hajek
Contact
Neues Institutsgebäude
Universitätsstr. 7/2nd floor
Room: D 209
1010 Vienna
T: +43-1-4277-494 93
E-Mail: katharina.hajek@univie.ac.at
Office hour
Upon agreement
Short CV
Katharina Hajek is a political scientist and joined the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna as a university assistant in 2024. Prior to that, she was a researcher and lecturere at the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Koblenz. In her dissertation at the University of Vienna, she examined the reemergence of demographic policies in German family policy. She was a Marietta Blau Fellow of the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and a visiting researcher at York University in Toronto and the Center for Interdisciplinary Women's and Gender Studies (ZIFG) at the Technical University of Berlin. As a project assistant and lecturer in the fields of political science and gender studies, she has worked at Bielefeld University, the University of Klagenfurt, and Ruhr University Bochum.
Research interests
In my research, I am primarily interested in the dynamic relationship between gender, gender relations and gendered identities and the political regulation of family, reproduction and care. I am not only interested in empirically saturated research of current policies and mobilizations in this area but also in the conceptual and theoretical linking of the findings to broader debates on the neoliberal transformation of statehood and the rise of the populist radical right in Europe.
I am particularly interested in the continuities as well as the re-emergence of demographic policy discourses and social investment strategies in family and social policy and their effects on the re-articulation of gendered and racialized inequalities. Furthermore I am focusing on the population and gender policy of the new populist radical right, both on the policy level as well as in the cultural politics of the New Right.
Research interests: Women's and gender politics, right-wing populism, family and social policy, welfare state, democracy, and political representation
Selected publications
Books/edited books
- Gender Studies zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Verlag 2025, mit Ina Kerner, Iwona Kocjan und Nicola Mühlhäußer.
- Familie und Biopolitik. Zur Regulierung und Reproduktion von Bevölkerung im Rahmen der ‚nachhaltigen Familienpolitik’ in Deutschland. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2020
- Que[e]r zum Staat. Heteronormativitätskritische Perspektiven auf Staat, Macht und Gesellschaft. Berlin: Querverlag 2012, mit Helga Haberler, Gundula Ludwig und Sara Paloni.
Articles
- Antonio Gramsci. In: Martin Endreß/Benjamin Rampp (Eds.): Politische Soziologie. Handbuch für Wissenschaft und Studium. Baden-Baden: Nomos (forthcoming)
- Productive and hazardous: Investing in families in social policy. In: Critical Social Policy, 44(1), 2023, 87–105.
- Contesting the meaning of gender and the family: Right-wing populism and gender in Germany. In: Women's Studies International Forum, Volume 95, November–December 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2022.102633, mit Viola Dombrowski.
- Zwischen Femonationalismus und Anti-Genderismus. Rechtspopulistische
Geschlechterpolitiken in Deutschland. In: GENDER. Antifeministische
Mobilisierungen, Sonderheft 2021, 42–58, Viola Dombrowski. - Krisen der Reproduktion. Schwerpunktheft Prokla. Bd. 49, Nr. 197, 2019, mit Julia Dück.
- Der biopolitische Charme der Familie. Die ‚nachhaltige Familienpolitik’ und die quantitative und qualitative Regulierung der Bevölkerung in Deutschland. In: Braun, Kathrin/Gerhards, Helene (Eds.): Biopolitiken. Regierungen des Lebens heute. Reihe: Politologische Aufklärung – konstruktivistische Perspektiven. Wiesbaden: Springer, 183–207.
- Mobilizing affects about intimate relationships – Emotional pedagogy among the New Right in Germany. In: Juvonen, Tuula/Kolehmainen, Marjo (Eds.): Affective Inequalities in Intimate Relationships. London: Routledge 2018, 171–185, mit Katja Chmilewski.
- Von Krücken, Tabus und Seilschaften. Aushandlungen, Effekte und Grenzen von Geschlechterquoten in Parteien. In: Herausgeberinnenkollektiv Blaustrumpf Ahoi (Ed.): „Sie meinen es politisch“. 100 Jahre Frauenwahlrecht in Österreich. Wien: Löcker, 285–297, mit Birgit Sauer.
- Crisis Management by Subjectivation. Towards a Feminist Neo-Gramscian Framework for the Analysis of Europe’s Multiple Crisis. In: Globalizations 13(2), 2015, 217–231, mit Benajmin Opratko.