Gilles Reckinger takes up the endowed professorship at the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences

Photo, from left to right: Johannes Pflegerl (Head of the Ilse Arlt Institute for Social Inclusion Research), Katharina Auer-Voigtländer (Head of the Department of Social Sciences), Gilles Reckinger, Hannes Raffaseder (Managing Director of the St. Pölten University of Applied Sciences) | Credit: Thomas Immervoll

The “Endowed Professorship for Migration, Internal Border Regimes and Bureaucracy” deals with the bureaucratic practice of migrants’ access to the health and social system. In December 2024, the cultural anthropologist and ethnologist Gilles Reckinger took up the professorship with St. Pölten UAS.

The state of Lower Austria is funding the endowed professorship through the Lower Austria Research Promotion Society (GFF).

Establishment of an international research group 

Nation states are increasingly controlling migration through social policy. The endowed professorship analyses border regimes that exist within a country.

“Due to the genuinely transdisciplinary orientation of the scientists working here and the research group to be established in the future, I expect innovative contributions to the empirical research of the highly relevant research field associated with the professorship. In particular, the focus should be on the transfer of scientifically generated knowledge into practice and to the public," says Reckinger.

International career

Reckinger has been teaching and researching as a private lecturer at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology at the University of Graz since 2020. From 2018 to 2023 he was Rector and Academic Director of the Institut Supérieur de l'Economie in Luxembourg, before that Professor for Intercultural Communication and Risk Research at the University of Innsbruck and Otto von Freising Visiting Professor at the Catholic University of Eichstätt in Germany. Reckinger studied cultural anthropology / European ethnology and sociology in Graz, Geneva, Quebec and Montreal and received his doctorate in Graz in 2009 as part of a DOC team scholarship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences.