Project "J:Ung"

Youth and Social Inequality in Longitudinal Section.
Interdisciplinary Analyses on the Reproduction and Transformation of Inequality
in the Life Realities of Viennese Youth (J:Ung)
(Austrian Academy of Science, DOC-team; 2022-2025)

J:Ung is funded by the Austrian Academy of Science as a DOC-team project and is carried out in cooperation with the Department of Sociology.

Finding an independent social position as a central task of the life phase of youth is of fundamental importance for questions of social reproduction and transformation. This positioning process is characterized by a pluralization of life plans on the one hand and a persistence of cross-generational social inequality on the other.

Against this backdrop, the project focuses on how young people deal with these challenging social conditions and the associated processes of transformation and reproduction of social inequality. An interdisciplinary team, which combines educational and sociological perspectives as well as different thematic and methodological foci, is dedicated to this research concern.

Data derived from the project “Pathways to the Future” by the Department of Sociology builds the basis for a secondary analysis in J:Ung, combining qualitative and quantitative analyses in order to work on individual research questions. The thematic focal points are the areas of ideas about the future (Malschinger), professional and educational biographies (Duncan) and political commitment (Danner).

Danners individual PhD project thus focusses on questions of effects of socio-economic background on ways of “getting political” (politicization) and political practices, assuming that processes of politicization can be understood as “Bildung”.