Anna Schwenck’s research lies at the intersection of cultural and political sociology. 
She studies how cultural understandings, be they transnational or locally specific, shape political behavior.

Her monograph Flexible Authoritarianism. Cultivating Ambition and Loyalty in Russia
(Oxford University Press, 2024) shows why winners of globalization come to support authoritarianism.

In her more recent work, she investigates how music and performances lend political claims plausibility. A central question is how offline and online cultural productions co-create political meanings and shape collective identifications.
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At the University of Innsbruck’s Department of Sociology Anna Schwenck contributes to the research area Theory, Knowledge, Culture. She is co-speaker of the network Music and Social Transformations of the Present (funded by the German Research Foundation).
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Her book received the Mary Douglas Prize for Best Book in the Sociology of Culture (ASA),
an honorable mention by the Council of European Studies’ European Studies Book Award  and was shortlisted for the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Book Awardin Political Sociology (ASA).