Felix Gaillinger

Felix Gaillinger is a research associate at the Institute of European Ethnology at the University of Vienna. He studied European Ethnology and Cultural Analysis and Language, Literature and Culture (M.A., B.A.), Italian Literature and Linguistics, Pedagogy / Educational Sciences (B.A.) at LMU Munich and University of Bologna. He is currently working on his PhD project on everyday sitting in urban spaces.

Research interests: family and kinship studies, biography and experience, (anti-)classism in theory and practice, cultural studies of literature, legal anthropology, urban studies and materialities of urban infrastructures

Current research project: Urbanes Sitzen. Eine Ethnographische Erkundung materieller Grundlagen und Praktiken alltäglicher Sozial- und Raumproduktion (= working title)
Who makes what demands on (their own) lingering, hanging out, chilling out, or even resting, who is the designer and who is the user of seating, and who profits or does not profit from its materiality in which way, eludes a normative setting in advance. With its relational perspectives on everyday arrangements, European Ethnology offers itself as a bridge-builder between perspectives on urban seating furniture and its everyday animation, which are often viewed in a distant way. The dissertation project presented here aims to elaborate a model of everyday cultural analysis of sitting, which is sharpened in the course of an ethnographic search for traces and historically precise localization in Vienna. In this way, it contours sitting on public architectural things itself as a specific moment in urban everyday life and challenges considerations of social and spatial production that are often kept rather abstract in terms of social analysis (cf. Habermas 1964; Negt/Kluge 1972; Arendt 2020; Butler 1993; Bourdieu 1985). This offers the possibility of systematically questioning already prominent and powerful narratives such as the presumed hostile character of urban architectural design, locating them in concrete situations, and thereby making accessible a broader consideration of everyday urban phenomena.

Publications:

together with Klaß, Anna (2024): Rethinking the Meaning of Class in Ethnographic Research Practice. Reihe Kulturanthropologie Notizen, Band 86. (peer reviewed; Open Access)
(2023): Ist Klassimuskritik lernbar? Reflexionen zum Versuch einer politischen Vermittlung sozialer Verhältnisse. In: Pohlkamp, Ines; Nagel, Björn; Carstens, Lea (Hg.): Klassismus und Politische Bildung. Intersektionale Perspektiven und Reflexionen aus der Praxis. Reihe nonformale politische Bildung. Frankfurt: Wochenschau-Verlag, S. 172-184.
(2022): Um den Unterhalt kämpfen! Junge Volljährige im Rechtsstreit gegen ihre Väter. München: Utzverlag, 136 S.