Field Trips & Walks
All tours are held in English. Participants are expected to find their own way to the meeting points. We advise using Google Maps to locate the meeting points. Tours are scheduled to run parallel to the scientific program. This means you can usually leave during a break, miss one full panel session, and return in time for the next break.
Due to our team’s responsibilities at the institute, no staff member will accompany the groups. However, if you’d like to go together with others, we recommend meeting in front of the NIG.
Smells like Wien Spirit
Tour Guide: Eugene Quinn, urbanist, founder of Whoosh and expert in sensory city tours
Date: Wednesday, 17.09.2025, 13:00–15:00
Meeting Point: 26-minute walk or 20 minutes by public transport from NIG - U6 Alser Straße (Hernals side)
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible, but a few hills – electric wheelchair recommended.
The tour “Smells like Wien Spirit” invites participants to approach Vienna and its built environment “like a dog,” with an embodied, olfactory approach. Looking at the west side of the city, you get hints of the Vienna woods, mountain air and a fresh breeze, but also sausages, coffee, chocolate, beer and street markets. And, on the other hand: the U6 underground line, some public toilets, a highway and the whiff of horse urine left under the Fiakers. Olfactory impressions help get to know and experience the city, its history, district-level specificities and its more-than-human inhabitants through the senses.
Smell is a powerful yet underexplored sensory modality in anthropology. This tour activates “the senses” as a research tool, offering insights into how urban atmospheres and social memories are produced and experienced beyond visual dominance.
PAX: 20
Price: 12€
Karl-Marx-Hof Revisited: Social Housing, Everyday Health and the Architecture of Welfare
Date: Thursday, 17.09.2025, 15:30–16:30
Meeting Point: 35 minutes by public transport from NIG - In front of Bahnhof Heiligenstadt (Final stop U4); Boschstraße
Accessibility: Wheelchair-accessible tour
The tour of the Karl-Marx-Hof offers insight into how architecture can embody a vision of social justice, public health, and collective care. As an iconic Gemeindebau of Red Vienna, it provided residents not only with housing but with baths, clinics, laundries, and childcare facilities—placing wellbeing at the center of urban design. In 1934, the building became a symbol of resistance against Austrofascism, highlighting the political stakes of health, housing, and community. For medical anthropology, the Karl-Marx-Hof stands as a powerful case of how infrastructures can shape both everyday life and the capacity to resist authoritarian regimes. After the tour, participants have the opportunity to visit the permanent exhibition at the museum "Waschsalon".
Social housing is a crucial site for studying structural care. This tour explores how architecture mediates collective wellbeing, access to health infrastructure, and forms of resistance, central concerns in both urban anthropology and the anthropology of public health.
PAX: 20
Price: 12€
Terribly Beautiful: The Hauntings of Healing and Harm at Steinhof
Tour Guides: Bernd-Christoph Völker (Museum Educator, Wien Museum) and Mara Köhler (PhD Student, Health Matters Research Group)
Date: Wednesday, 17.09.2025, 17:30 – 19:00
Meeting Point: 50 minutes by public transport from NIG - Gatehouse by the 48A bus stop, Baumgartner Höhe 1, 1140 Vienna
Accessibility: Not fully wheelchair accessible.
The tour Terribly Beautiful invites participants to explore Vienna's medical past by walking through the historic hospital grounds of Steinhof. Opened in 1907 during Imperial Austria's final years, the grounds served as a model psychiatric institution and an Art Nouveau architectural landmark. Under National Socialism, it became a central site of Nazi eugenics in Vienna. In the postwar decades, rehabilitation and systemic neglect continued side by side. Today, as clinical operations wind down, new futures emerge: from claims to Europe's largest COVID-19 testing laboratory during the pandemic to a cultural hub for the arts. Perched above Vienna, Steinhof reflects more than a century of shifting regimes of healing and harm that continue to haunt the present.
Steinhof offers a layered site for medical anthropological reflection: from the aesthetics of care in early psychiatric architecture to the horrors of Nazi biopolitics and the slow transformations of postwar healthcare. This tour addresses how regimes of healing and harm materialize in institutional space and memory. It invites critical engagement with medical violence, moral repair, and the entanglements of public health with political ideologies.
PAX: 20
Price: 12€
Tour of Narrenturm (the Fools' Tower)
Tour Guide: Beatrix Patzak, former director of the Narrenturm Museum
Date: Thursday, 18.09.2025, 11:30–12:30
Meeting Point: 15-minute walk from NIG - In front of the Narrenturm (Spitalgasse 2, 1090 Wien)
Accessibility: Wheelchair-accessible tour
The Narrenturm is a significant monument to the history of medical care and psychiatry in the late 18th century. Founded in 1784, it was established to care for people with mental illnesses. The building is a listed historic monument and is now owned by the University of Vienna. In 1971, it became home to the Federal Pathological-Anatomical Museum, which was integrated into the Natural History Museum Vienna in 2012 as the Pathological-Anatomical Collection in the Narrenturm.
This tour offers direct engagement with the historical institutions of psychiatry and the shifting boundaries of what was considered “madness” and “care.” The anatomical specimens and moulages displayed at the Narrenturm have long served as tools for pathologization but also medical knowledge transmission, making this site especially relevant for exploring how knowledge is produced, visualized, and taught in historical and contemporary contexts.
PAX: 20
Price: 12€
Vienna and Its Colonial Legacy
Tour Guide: Marcela Torres Heredia, PhD in Cultural and Social Anthropology from the University of Vienna and initiator of Decolonizing in Vienna!
Date: Thursday, 18.07.2025, 13:30–15:30
Meeting Point: 25-minute walk or 15 minutes by public transport from NIG - Marcus-Omofuma-Stone (Mariahilfer Str. 1, 1070 Vienna)
Accessibility: Wheelchair-accessible tour
This walking tour invites participants to uncover the colonial traces embedded in the heart of Vienna. Together, we will visit historical sites that reveal often-overlooked yet deeply rooted colonial entanglements. By taking a critical look at familiar urban landscapes, we revisit the city’s colonial legacy and reflect on its ongoing impact today. The tour offers space for dialogue, reflection, and new perspectives — an invitation to see Vienna through a different lens.
Decolonial anthropology interrogates (hidden) colonial continuities in contemporary Europe. This tour opens a space to reflect on the intersection of space, race, memory, and resistance, bringing forward an ethical and political dimension of anthropological practice.
PAX: 20
Price: 12€
Mental Health and the City
Tour Guide: Eugene Quinn, urbanist and DJ, founder of Whoosh and expert in sensory city tours
Date: Thursday, 18.09.2025, 17:30–19:30
Meeting Point: 25-minute walk or 20 minutes by public transport from NIG - Blindengasse 46a, 1080 Wien
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible, but a few hills – electric wheelchair recommended.
The tour “Mental Health and the City” looks at Vienna from a psychosocial perspective, giving an overview of its long history around questions of mental health, wellbeing, and illness. It will explore the social design of Vienna, and whether it makes people “happy” or not: how can a city be simultaneously the “most-liveable”, and, supposedly, the “least-friendly”? The tour will also discuss which of Freud's ideas still work in 2025; Otto Wagner’s work on neurodivergence; as well as Anna Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Hildegard Katschnig, Jakob Levy Moreno, & the Narrenturm.
This tour provides a living ethnography of mental health in Vienna. It raises questions about institutional care, cultural models of distress, and the impact of urban design on emotional life—key topics in psychological, medical, and urban anthropology.
PAX: 20
Price: 12€
We want freedom, peace, and justice! - Feminist Walks through Vienna
Tour Guide: Petra Unger, founder of the Viennese Women's Walks and expert in feminist education
Date: Friday, 11:00–13:30
Meeting Point: Start: 15- minute walk from NIG - Grete Rehor Park, 1010 Wien / End: 18 minutes by public transport or 20 minutes walking - Kleeblattgasse 7, 1010 Wien
Accessibility: Wheelchair accessible, but a few hills – electric wheelchair recommended.
This feminist city walk takes participants through central Vienna to trace the stories of well-known and lesser-known women who shaped the city's history. From the early struggles for voting rights and education to the fight for bodily autonomy and self-determination, the tour reflects on moments of protest, solidarity, and transformation. Starting with the 20,000 women* who marched the Ringstraße in 1911, we follow the impact of the First and Second Women’s Movements and make visible a powerful, yet often untold, history of feminist resistance and change.
Feminist anthropology examines how gender structures are embedded in public space and historical narratives. This tour makes visible the embodied struggles for reproductive rights, education, and political participation - key issues in the anthropology of the body and activism.
PAX: 15
Price: 12€
Tour of the Jewish Museum: Tikkun haOlam – Healing the World
Tour Guide: Hannah Landsmann, Head of Communication & Mediation at the Jewish Museum Vienna
Date: Friday, 13:30–14:30
Meeting Point: 18 minutes by public transport or 22 minutes walking from NIG - In front of the Jewish Museum, Dorotheergasse 11, 1010 Wien
Accessibility: Wheelchair-accessible tour.
The Jewish Museum Vienna (JMW) is an institution dedicated to Jewish history, culture, and religion in Austria. The museum presents both permanent and temporary exhibitions that explore Jewish life in Austria—past and present—and offers space for reflection, dialogue, and discovery. Our guided tour will explore the museum through the lens of Tikkun haOlam – a Hebrew concept meaning "repairing the world." Resting, remembrance, commemoration, fasting, celebration, and Tzedakah are well illustrated throughout the museum.
This tour connects to broader questions of memory, trauma, resilience, and community care. Through the concept of Tikkun haOlam, it links cultural healing with the anthropological study of ethics, ritual, and historical justice.
PAX: 15
Price: 12€
Registration is only open to participants who are already registered and attending in person - 1 tour per day.