I teach in the Department of European Ethnology at the University of Vienna, where I offer courses on ethnographic method, language and meaning, infrastructures of trust, and the cultural politics of technology. My teaching is informed by ongoing research, and often involves experimentation with assignments, formats, and collaborative approaches to knowledge.
Language, Culture, and Semiotic Practice
Here I focus on how meaning is made in everyday life. Students learn to analyze linguistic and communicative practices using tools from linguistic anthropology and semiotics. We read classic and contemporary texts and explore how language ideologies shape institutions and technologies.
B420 Language and/as Culture (2021W)
B330 Ethnographic Perspectives on Language and Interaction (2020W)
M320 Cultural Practices and Semiosis in Everyday Life: Writing a Journal Article (2024S)
Doing Ethnography, Digitally and Otherwise
In these courses, I work with students at both the BA and MA level to develop their ethnographic sensibilities through both analog and digital fieldwork. We discuss practical and ethical aspects of method, explore digital tools, and reflect on our positions as researchers.
M510 Digital and Analog Ethnography (2023W)
B330 Digital Ethnographic Methods (2023S)
Worlds Ending, Worlds Emerging
In these courses, we explore how people imagine—and materially prepare for—the end of the world. From nuclear catastrophe to climate collapse and technological transcendence, students engage with apocalyptic narratives as both cultural texts and political tools.
In From Atom to Anthropocene, we traced the entanglements of science, technology, and governance through the lens of extinction and survival, analyzing Cold War logics alongside contemporary planetary crisis. In another course On the End of the World, we examined how apocalyptic imaginaries travel across time, media, and ideology, asking what ends and what begins when a world collapses.
Trust in Technology?
This was an innovative COIL (Collaborative Online International Learning) seminar co-taught with Shaila Seshia Galvin and her students at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Bringing together ethnographic perspectives from two institutions, the course explored how infrastructures like blockchains, archives, and algorithms are designed to produce trust—and how they are contested in practice. Students worked collaboratively across institutions, sharing fieldwork and building comparative case studies.
M510 Technologies of Trust
Archives, Controversies, and Ethnographic Histories
In these project-based seminars, students explore the politics of knowledge through archival research and historiographic methods. We ask how ethnographic insights can inform our reading of historical documents, and how cultural memory is contested and remade.
Ethnography in the Archive (2023W)
Historical Methods: Conflict and Controversy (2024S)
I have also co-taught courses at Stanford University and served as a teaching assistant at the University of Chicago and Sciences Po, contributing to interdisciplinary programs in anthropology, political science, and science and technology studies.
You can view a full list of past and current courses on my teaching page at the University of Vienna.