Andreas Glaeser                                          

Welcome,

      I am a hermeneutic sociologist teaching at the University of Chicago. Here you will find information about my research and my teaching activities, a little bit something about my background, and how to get in touch with me.

 

“Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition and the End of East German Socialism” is now available in bookstores. At the PUBLICATIONS page you can find links to a few sample chapters. Parts of the project are described in the RESEARCH pages on KNOWLEDGE as well as on SOCIALISM.

Two lectures I have recently given at the New School for Social Research and at the University of Toronto provide partial overviews over the book. Here they are. The first focuses on the dynamics between understandings and institutions using material from the opposition as an example (linked HERE). The second one focuses on the link between power and knowledge emphasizing the role of the secret police within the socialist project (linked HERE)

 

I have begun researching and writing a third book with the working title “Agency, Institutions and Understanding: A Sociology of Liberation”. With it I aim to offer a fundamental critique of the schizoid contemporary social imaginary that flip-flops between ontological individualism categorically asserting persons’ power to act on the one hand and structural determinism which pays no heed to individual actors in whatever form or shape on the other. Instead I aim to show how agency does not only vary historically and situationally but how it can be cultivated by individuals and collectivities from within a realistic understanding of the operation of institutional arrangements. Thus I aim to rejuvenate and reposition an older normative understanding of the task of the social sciences as a reflexive enterprise in the service of emancipatory politics.

 

 

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