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The Department of Sociology at the University of Potsdam offers a Bachelor as well as a Master in Sociology, unique in the Berlin-Brandenburg region. We thus provide students with the rare opportunity to get to know the discipline in its breadth and to study it in a concentrated way.
The Sociology Department currently comprises six professorships and two functional positions, each of which represents a different substantive focus and thus offers the subject in its substantive breadth. Methodological diversity and theoretical plurality are among the hallmarks of Potsdam’s sociology. Research orientation and excellent teaching are combined with the theoretical traditions of the subject as well as with innovative forms of teaching.
The Centre for Citizenship, Social Pluralism and Religious Diversity is a space of international, critical and vivid sociological and interdisciplinary debate on today’s worldwide major economic, political, social and cultural problems and challenges.
Research interest encompasses the analysis of the transformation of citizenship as a concept, the impact of neo-liberalism on democracy, the rise of right-wing populism, the de-democratization of cities and spaces. Research also focuses on major rights issues such as gender and sexual minorities’ rights in a context of aging societies, religious conflicts and migration.
The primary goal of the Potsdam Center for Quantitative Research (PCQR) is to network the research of the professorships of the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences and thereby increase the research output. In addition to advanced data analysis and applied empirical methods for the academic staff, the PCQR lecture series was established, in which internal and external scientists take turns to present their research.
The spokesperson of the research center is Prof. Dr. Ulrich Kohler.
The goal of the study of sociology is the scientific preparation for professional activities in various fields of practice. Sociological knowledge is applied in the sectors of education and research, associations and political parties, in non-governmental and non-profit organizations, in public administration and private business enterprises, in welfare state institutions, in the field of cultural management and in the media.
The study program of the Sociology Department includes a Bachelor’s and a Master’s program. In addition, sociology can be chosen as a supplementary subject in two other study programs (bachelor’s program in economics and bachelor’s program in history, politics and society).
The network “Political Sociology of Transnational Fields” facilitates a cross-project collaboration of young scholars on the study of transnational socialization processes with the aim to capture policy-related transnationalization processes, to systematize methodological insights from different research contexts, and to identify basic theoretical mechanisms of transnationalization.
At the end of 2020, the doctoral program “Good Work in a Transformative World” was launched at the WZB, in the context of which fellows are doing their doctorates on the topic of work in the context of digitalization, globalization, demographic change, and ecological sustainability. Academic staff can take advantage of the program’s offerings (e.g., the “Writing Workshop”).
