MCI Professorship for Christina Lienhart

The Entrepreneurial School® awards professorship to Dr. Christina Lienhart

In recognition of her outstanding achievements in research and teaching, as well as her formative contributions to the ongoing development of the Entrepreneurial School®, MCI has awarded the title of Professor to Dr. Christina Lienhart of the Department of Social Work. In the presence of longtime companions and colleagues, she received the honor from MCI Rector Andreas Altmann and the Head of the Academic Council, Franz Pegger, before giving her inaugural lecture, offering fascinating insights into her research fields.

Christina Lienhart has dedicated herself to the field of Social Work for decades with great commitment and academic excellence. After serving as a social worker — including at the University Hospital Innsbruck — and spending many years in research and development at SOS Children’s Villages, she has been working as a Senior Lecturer at MCI’s Department of Social Work since 2021. She completed her doctoral studies in Educational Science at the University of Siegen in 2023 with distinction. Christina Lienhart is also actively involved in numerous professional societies and networks, editorial boards, and the Tyrolean Child and Youth Welfare Advisory Board. She contributes her expertise particularly in the fields of child and youth welfare, as well as in bridging social work and social pedagogy.

In her inaugural lecture on the topic “Doing Family in Reintegration Processes from Residential Care”, she began by outlining how reintegration processes from residential care back into families are (de)thematized in professional discourse, research, and statistics. Using a case study involving both a family-excluding and a family-supporting out-of-home care setting, she illustrated how young people and parents (re)construct family — and thus belonging and boundaries — under challenging circumstances. (Un)Doing Family is vividly shown here as the meaning-making and coping strategies of those affected, which are significantly influenced by social work organizations and decisions made by the justice system.