Updates
Workshops, conferences, new colleagues, awards and press coverage.
The ERC-funded project INCONEX, led by Dr Lucy Kinski, sought a motivated student assistant to join the team at the University of Salzburg — supporting literature and data research, data processing, and content analysis (10 hours/week; BA/MA enrolment; very good German and/or Spanish).
The INCONEX kick-off workshop brought together leading experts to discuss representative claims, group appeals, and the crucial role of absence in representation. Held online on Friday, 12 December 2025, 13:45–17:45 CET.
We were delighted to welcome two new PhD students, Anna-Lotta Dechow and Oscar Mendoza Hernandez, to the INCONEX team. Over the coming years, we will together investigate how citizens and interests become absent from democratic representation — whether intentionally or unintentionally.
At the ECPR General Conference 2025, Lucy Kinski and Clint Claessen presented two papers — on conceptualizing representative absence, and on using text-as-data methods to capture the presence and absence of social groups in parliamentary debates.
Lucy Kinski was elected as one of eight new members of the Young Academy of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW), joining an interdisciplinary network of award-winning researchers under the age of 40. New members received their certificates from Academy President Dr Heinz Faßmann.
For International Women’s Day, the Salzburger Nachrichten portrayed two successful Salzburg researchers — one of them EU expert Lucy Kinski. Article by Stefan Veigl.
“In the political process certain groups are represented, while others are made absent — consciously or unconsciously,” explains Kinski. “Absence is at the core of the current crisis of modern democracies.” Article by Theresa Steffner.
Dr Lucy Kinski, of the Salzburg Centre of European Union Studies (SCEUS) and the Department of Political Science at PLUS, was awarded a €1.5 million ERC Starting Grant over five years for her research on the politics of absence.
