Mag. Dr. Andrea Schikowitz
Biography
Andrea Schikowitz is a researcher (post-doc) at the Department of Science and Technology Studies, Vienna University. She works on (digital) knowledge practices & infrastructures in distributed urban planning and controversies. Andrea is a research affiliate at the Research Platform The Challenge of Urban Futures.
Before that, she held a postdoc position at the Friedrich Schiedel-endowed Chair for Sociology of Science at the Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS) at the Technical University Munich (TUM), where she worked on urban transformation in living labs and collaborative housing.
In her previous pre-and postdoc engagements at the Institute for Organization Studies and the Research Institute for Urban Management and Governance at the Vienna University for Economics and Business (WU), she worked on public governance and public sector identities, and in the course of a scholarship she started engaging with urban planning and movements.
In 2017, Andrea defended her doctoral dissertation “Choreographies of Togetherness. Re-Ordering Collectivity and Individuality in Transdisciplinary Sustainability Research in Austria”, that was conducted in the frame of the research project “Transdisciplinarity as Culture and Practice” at the STS department at the University of Vienna.
Current Research Interests – (Digital) Knowledge Practices in Urban Planning & Controversies
Andrea Schikowitz’ research is addressing the encounter of diverse ways of knowing and how this is related to possibilities for change. She has investigated this question by analysing various settings – such as transdisciplinary sustainability research, public governance, urban living labs, collaborative housing, and urban planning controversies.
In her habilitation project, Andrea deals with ‘distributed urban planning’, where diverse public, civic and private actors get involved in the creation, negotiation and shaping of urban spaces in collaborative as well as controversial ways. She is analysing how different knowledges and knowledge practices are involved in such planning processes and controversies, with a focus on the role of (more-than-digital) knowledge infrastructures which facilitate but also direct the production, exchange and use of different knowledges in urban planning. Building on approaches from STS, urban studies and social movement studies, Andrea is conducting a multi-sited ethnography, tracing and mapping different sites, instruments and processes of assembling, exchanging and negotiating planning knowledges. Empirical sites for this research are for instance new city development areas in Vienna, where different actors aim to induce diverse urban qualities. These areas constitute sites for experimental learning and collaborative planning, and they provide opportunities for challenging and intervening in official planning policies.
Andrea Schikowitz participates in collective autoethnographic research on academic work, together with Esther Dessewffy, Bao-Chau Pham, Ariadne Avkıran, Fredy Mora Gámez,, Kathleen Gregory, Constantin Holmer and Sarah Davies. They have been addressing for instance (digital) writing and data practices, care, and infrastructuring. Reflecting on how more live-able working conditions in academia can be brought about, they are experimenting with feminist approaches and different ways of representing their research – such as a pinboard or a zine.
- Knowledge practices and sense-making
- Identity work, collectivity in epistemic cultures in science and beyond
- Controversies and alternativeness
- Collaborative research, inter- and transdisciplinarity
- Urban transformation and planning
- Technosciences, materiality & digital cultures
Teaching & Supervision
Andrea Schikowitz is teaching in the Master program “Science-Technology-Society”, and in undergraduate courses at the Department of Science and Technology Studies. She is supervising Master projects, and she is part of Esther Dessewffy's PhD-supervision team.