Political sociologist
Joschka Philipps
I’m a political sociologist focusing on youth, urbanity, uncertainty and contestation through interdisciplinary perspectives. Based at the Africa Multiple Cluster at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, our Junior Research Group “Politics of the Unknown” works with photography, critical cartography, and various qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze how information circulates in contexts of emergency and conflict. Since most of my research has taken place in Guinea’s capital city Conakry, I’ve arguably learned as much from the city and its people as I did from academic texts.
Doing global sociology thus means to me engaging with complex methodological questions (what is “empirical” and what is “theoretical” and to what degree is it possible to distinguish between the two? What analytical work is being unwittingly absorbed by the conceptual frameworks we use?) and to do so collectively in the spirit of critical eclecticism
