Tatjana Thelen

Tatjana Thelen is a Full Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and holds fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Paris and the FMSH (Fondation Maison des Sciences de l'homme). She serves as Deputy Director of the Vienna Doctoral School of Social Sciences and co-directs the Research Platform for the Study of Transformations and Eastern Europe. Her work bridges kinship studies, care ethics, and state anthropology, with a focus on post-socialist Europe and interdisciplinary critique of Western epistemologies.

• Academic Leadership: Deputy Director of Vienna Doctoral School; Co-founder of CAST (Care and State) network; Director of Vienna Ethnography Laboratories
• Research Themes: Kinship-state interplay, care practices in political belonging, post-socialist transformation, relational theory, social security frameworks

Her relational anthropology examines how care responsibilities shape state boundaries and generate inclusion/exclusion dynamics through kinship measurements. She critiques the Western assumption that modernity diminishes political kinship, analyzing its persistence in citizenship, property relations, and welfare systems. Current projects explore political atmospheres and their role in state boundary demarcation.

Scientific Recognition:

• Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair, Stanford University (2023)
• Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Paris (2020-21)
• Fellow, Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF), Bielefeld (2016-17)

She has supervised PhD projects on topics including:

• Ukrainian female labor migration and left-behind families
• Corporate Social Responsibility in Turkey
• Ecological villages in China
• Kinship-politics conceptual history
• State care in socialist Hungary
• Rural Hungarian state rescaling
• Serbian local state practices