The VID is a research institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and Austria’s largest research institution specialising in demography and population studies. It is part of the ÖAW’s new Campus Akademie in the heart of Vienna, which offers over 30,000 square meters of space and more than 1,000 workplaces for ÖAW institutes. Our research addresses population dynamics, population structures and their drivers, with a focus on fertility and family, health and longevity, migration, and population economics. These topics reflect fundamental aspects of human life and hold high relevance for policy, guiding our efforts to better understand the demographic processes that shape modern societies.
The VID is committed to advancing the field of demography through innovative research and by expanding the classical demographic framework—centred on age and sex—by adding education as a third core analytical dimension to provide a more comprehensive understanding of population change. This approach, pursued under the label of the “Vienna School of Demography”, builds on foundational contributions by the VID’s former director Wolfgang Lutz. Together with our strong expertise in comparative European demography and the demography of Austria, the VID’s research groups conduct cutting-edge work in the two core focus areas “Demography and Human Capital” and “Demography of Europe”.
The five-year project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and is headed by Ljiljana Radonić.
The ‘universalization of the Holocaust’ has established the Shoah as a historical reference point legitimizing a global moral imperative to respect human rights. Much has been written about the ostensible ‘globalization of memory’, but as yet no genuinely global comparative study systematically confronting this hypothesis with the actual representations of atrocities exists.
GMM examines 50 memorial museums dealing with
Scholars claim that ‘globalized’ memorial museums reflect new moral standards and a new language of commemoration, but what is the price of the attendant decontextualization in the name of moral universals? This first global typology of memorial museums challenges the concept of ‘universal memory’ and the notion that memorial museums constitute a globalized space of communication and negotiation.
