معرفی
Ingrid Thurner is a Lecturer at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology within the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Vienna. She has been teaching at the University of Vienna since 1985 and specifically in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology since 1995.
Dr. Thurner's research spans multiple interconnected areas including Anthropology of Travel, Tourism, and Pilgrimage; Tourism Representations and Visual Culture; Othering, Essentializing, Stereotyping, Exotism, Racism, and Anti-Muslim Racism; Anthropology of Media; and Anthropology of Islam and Islamic Diaspora. Her work critically examines how cultural representations shape tourism experiences and how tourism, in turn, influences cultural perceptions and identities across diverse contexts.
Her publications explore the complex interplay between travel practices, national images, and destination branding, with particular attention to Islamic pilgrimage as tourism event and the representation of Muslim communities in media and tourism contexts. Recent works examine migration rights, West African urban landscapes, and contemporary debates around gender and identity.
Dr. Thurner is also a member of the Participant Media Observation (TMB) group, an initiative of lecturers, alumni, and students at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. She has contributed to public discourse through regular articles in newspapers and magazines on travel, tourism, and cultural contact situations since 1990.
Professionally, she has extensive experience beyond academia, having worked for various tour operators in product management and as a tour leader for cultural and indigenous tourism destinations in North and West Africa and the Middle East since 1983. From 1981 to 1993, she was a staff member at the Weltmuseum in Vienna in the Africa and Photography departments. She has also curated exhibitions at the Museum of Niederösterreich and written extensively on linguistic diversity in Austria and cultural representation in tourism contexts.
