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September 2012 - present
October 2007 - August 2012
Publications
Publications (51)
The chapter reworks Victor Turner’s concept of “social drama” in order to analyze the case of AlphaGo as a technological breakthrough in AI research. Social dramas stemming from technological breakthroughs are triggered by publicized violations of cognitive expectations that raise fundamental questions in their field, e.g. regarding the nature of i...
Building on Jeffrey Alexander’s theory of the civil sphere, this chapter focuses on the work of Shalom Alaikum—Jewish Aid for Refugees, an NGO formed in Vienna in the wake of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. Shalom Alaikum exemplifies a special case of the “righteous” in international migration because their work is influenced not only by clea...
Elaborating on theories of the social imaginary, this contribution addresses the shortcomings of a differential conception of meaning, which is widespread in the social and cultural sciences. After a brief literature review, a preliminary concept of the social imaginary and its sociological relevance will be outlined drawing on the works of Taylor...
The September 2015 photograph of Alan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian boy, lying facedown and dead on a Turkish beach, quickly became an iconic representation of Europe's “refugee crisis.” Even though images of distant suffering of refugees have become ubiquitous, only a few become iconic. It is this cultural process of iconization that often bedevils s...
This study offers a sociological analysis of a student carnival in communist Czechoslovakia, the Majales in Bratislava and Prague in May 1956. Utilizing sources such as newspaper articles, photographs and witness accounts, this case study aims to reconstruct the conditions, meanings and consequences of Majales, employing a theoretical framework tha...
While not particularly popular or well-known in anglophone sociology or even cultural sociology, there seems to be a renaissance of Luhmann’s work. This essay discusses three recent books on and from Luhmann, which cover the famous Habermas–Luhmann debate, give us a taste of what can been called Luhmann’s empirical cultural sociology and, finally,...
As a social phenomenon, artificial intelligence (AI) is not just technically but also culturally constructed. This article investigates the meaning-making of AI in the case of AlphaGo by employing and refining cultural sociological narrative analysis. Building on Smith’s structural model of genre, whose horizontal axis reflects varying degrees of (...
Photographs of migrants can evoke powerful reactions. Since the ‘migration crisis’ of 2015–16, politicians, media, and the public have all expressed strong opinions about people who cross borders. Within the civil spheres of Western democracies, debates about who belongs as a ‘good citizen’, and who should be excluded as an ‘anticivil’ outsider, re...
This chapter analyzes the rise of right-wing populism in Germany empirically while exploring the link between memory cultures and civil solidarity theoretically. As the German case suggests, national memory cultures and foundational myths do not necessarily lead to particularistic and anti-civil identifications but may even facilitate the incorpora...
Starting with George Orwell's liberal problem of meaning, this article investigates liberalism as cultural structure and myth, drawing on the theory of civil sphere by Jeffrey C. Alexander and the science fiction novels of Ian M. Banks. Following Alexander, it is argued that liberal societies are built around a sacred core described by the cultural...
The concept of social performance is a major theoretical innovation of the strong program in cultural sociology, championed by Jeffrey C. Alexander. This article offers a critical assessment of Alexander’s last four monographs on political performances with the explicit aim of contributing to the future development of the performance approach. Afte...
Symbole verbinden. Sie stiften Beziehungen zwischen Menschen und Völkern. Ursprünglich stand das griechische symbolon für eine zerbrochene Tonscherbe, von der der Gastgeber einen Teil behielt und dessen Gegenstück er seinem Gast mitgab.
Violence is a fundamental possibility in social interactions. In everyday life, it is not so much the actual use of violence as its latency that shapes and influences social relations. Violence can be used as a threat, it can certainly be used as means to certain ends, but it also may appear as an end in itself, seemingly without further purpose. P...
The concept of “collectivity” has been central to our discipline since its beginnings ‒ just think of Klassenbewusstsein (Marx) or conscience collectif (Durkheim). Nevertheless, the notion of collectivity has mostly been taken for granted and thus remained ambiguous and under-theorized to this day. What distinguishes a collective belief from indivi...
Risks are not objective “facts” that are directly experienced. Our risk perception not only changes in social and political contexts but is also mediated through pre-existing cultural patterns. By investigating an American and a German case, we would like to show how shocking events bring about decisive shifts in our risk perception and governance...
„Noch der einsame Mann auf der sprichwörtlichen Insel habitualisiert sein Tun“ heißt es in der Gesellschaftlichen Konstruktion der Wirklichkeit von Peter L. Berger und Thomas Luckmann, einem der erfolgreichsten soziologischen Bücher aller Zeiten. Die beiden Autoren greifen in ihrer Theorie der Institutionalisierung – zunächst implizit, dann auch ex...
Drawing and elaborating the concept of performativity, this paper analyzes the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as well as the use of torture in the War on Terror as performance. Contrary to Baudrilliard's thesis on 9/11 as an answerable gift, the latter can be described as an »adequate« symbolic response to the former. Finally, I will show...
Culture is a sphere of approximations and indeterminacy, for which phenomena like translation and transgression are constitutive. By exploring the tensions between logos and mythos, cultural representation and and its destruction, morality and law as well as between religiosity and secularism, we not only want to investigate the logic of culture, b...
This paper demonstrates that systems of morality cannot be without contradictions and complete at the same time. Moral judgments are therefore governed by a fuzzy logic of situative and narrative appropriateness. After a sociologically adequate understanding of morality is developed, the paper will discuss two cases, the Kantian prohibition of lyin...
Die Missbrauchsfälle im irakischen Abu-Ghraib-Gefängnis sorgten im Mai 2004 für weltweite Empörung. Diese Studie untersucht den amerikanischen Diskurs zu Abu Ghraib. Sie bietet eine Interpretation der Skandalfotografien und eine umfangreiche Analyse von Presseartikeln und Fernsehtranskripten (2004-2009), die erstmals die Spätfolgen des Skandals für...
This chapter offers a cultural sociological reading of Searle’s social ontology and a case study from the War on Terror. A brief conceptual introduction is followed by a proposal for a more cultural understanding of Searle’s background that also includes representational elements. Such a conception might prove useful to explain complex institutiona...
In recent years, the concept of the “secular icon” has become more and more popular in the field of visual studies. Secular icons are widely regarded as images of extraordinary symbolic power and as carriers of collective emotions and meanings. The following contribution offers a theoretical elaboration and a comparative case study of secular icons...
Drawing on the Abu Ghraib scandal and the photographs that helped precipitate it, the chapter discusses torture as a form of ritualization calculated to forge an enemy and consolidate absolute power. Torture, it shows, bears similarities to forms of initiation, but it is actually a systematic elaboration of cruelty for political purposes. To study...
L’article etudie l’emploi du concept de performance au sein de la theorie sociologique contemporaine et developpe pour lui-meme une typologie de l’action performative en trois parties. Primo, les performances ritualisees se concentrent sur la maniere dont ses participants s’y conforment. Secundo, les performances theâtralisees sont caracterisees pa...
