Katharina Gartner

Katharina Gartner is a Lecturer at the University of Vienna across the Departments of African Studies, Education, Musicology, and Anthropology, and serves as an External Lecturer at Vienna University of Economics and Business. She previously held research positions at Harvard University (2022) and the University of Ghana (2021/22), and was awarded the IFK Junior Fellow Abroad fellowship (2021-22).

Her interdisciplinary education spans African studies, anthropology of music, psychoanalysis of youth, and educational studies, with academic training in Vienna, Paris, and Accra. This foundation is complemented by practical experience as a youth counselor and performing musician.

Gartner's research investigates youth and expressive cultures in urban Africa, focusing on Ghanaian instrumental musicians' creative networks, gender performances, and responses to globalization. She critically examines "prolonged youth" amid precarity, digital transformation, and translocal connections, synthesizing youth studies, ethnomusicology, and cultural anthropology to analyze identity formation in neoliberal contexts.

Her scholarly output reveals a trajectory from educational counseling to ethnographic studies of African music scenes, consistently exploring how creativity functions within structural constraints. Recent work integrates psychoanalytic frameworks with cultural analysis to decode play, nonsense, and embodied expression in youth cultures.

Scientific recognition includes:

• IFK Junior Fellow Abroad (International Research Center for Cultural Studies, 2021-22)

Through university teaching and fieldwork across Africa, Gartner mentors students in ethnographic methodology while developing collaborative projects on youth cultures. Her research is institutionally supported by fellowships from Harvard University, the University of Ghana, and the IFK.

She actively participates in international research collectives including Harvard's African Studies program and the International Research Center for Cultural Studies, driving interdisciplinary dialogues on music, youth, and urban transformation in Global South contexts.