Research Focus Areas

Short Biography

Helen Vaaks is a visual ethnography PraeDoc at the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Vienna. She is currently involved in a transdisciplinary research project 'Enabling Migrants to Cycle' (EMCY) investigating representational politics and the barriers that prevent people with migrant backgrounds from taking up biking, using visual methods. The project is a collaboration with stape e.U., Vienna University of Technology and klarFAKT, and financed by the Federal Ministry for Climate Protection, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology as part of FEMtech Research Projects 2023.

In 2024 she shot a short ethnographic film "Zwischen uns Arbeit (work between us)", part of a research team with Elaine Goldberg (producer and director) in collaboration with the Ludwig-Boltzmann-Gesellschaft, exploring the concept of "care" and the process of transdisciplinary research in caring communities.

Additionally, she produced a short film "Frauen in Fahrt" under the guidance of Sanderien Verstappen about cycling empowerment amongst female migrants. Her MA thesis was a visual research, "Working with the mussels", on why and how people care about nature, more specifically, about an endangered species freshwater pearl mussel in Estonia. The thesis was contributing to the project CONTOURS: Conservation, Tourism, Remoteness funded by ERA-NET Rus Plus.