Fall trimester 2024

Global perspectives on democracy
In recent years, diagnoses of a worldwide decline of democracy abound. The evidence for this decline ranges from authoritarian turns in various states to the global rise of extrem-ist, anti-democratic forces. While sociology has a history of marginalizing the concept of democracy, these developments inevitably draw sociological attention. How can the au-thoritarian shifts in society be explained sociologically? How to understand the relation between social and democratic practices in general? And: Does sociology offer approaches to democracy understood as a global matter? These are the main questions we will follow throughout the course. In doing so, participants will be introduced to different approaches – from Critical Theory to New Institutionalism, from Cosmopolitism to Cosmopolitics – that open a sociological view on global democracy. Together we will explore their potential to help us better understand our present.

Spring trimester 2024

Power & Society
‘Power’ is one of the central concepts in the social sciences, and yet there is no single definition in use. The aim of this seminar series is to provide an overview of the most important understandings of power in sociology and political theory. It does so through a close engagement with the works of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Michel Foucault, Erving Goffman, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, as well as postcolonial theorists including Dipesh Chakrabarty, Franz Fanon and Gayatri Spivak. (Seminar series with Endre Dányi)

Methods of text analysis
When it comes to the evaluation of data material within qualitative-empirical social research, the focus is often on methods of text analysis. Simple forms of text analysis are certainly as old as writing itself, their systematization and standardization followed later - within the social sciences, both have only been promoted since the middle of the 20th century. The development of methods of social science text analysis - we will get to know some of them in the course of the seminar, from grounded theory to discourse analysis - runs parallel to an increased awareness of the societal significance of language in general and text in particular. Text analysis methods are also so important within qualitative social research because, in principle, any form of data can be represented in text form: from documents to interviews, from observations to image data. This means that they are accessible for evaluation using text-analytical methods and can be questioned accordingly: What does this text say about society, about the social context, about the social group in which it was created?