Sociologist
Marian Burchardt
I am professor of sociology with a focus on transregional studies at Leipzig University where I co-direct the Leipzig Lab “Global Health” and serve as an associate member of the Humanities Center of Advanced Studies on Multiple Secularities. As a cultural sociologist, I am interested in the entanglements of the multiple scales of social and institutional life with regard to three fields of study: (1) cultural diversity and citizenship, (2) infrastructure and urban space, (3) sexuality, health and gender. My research engages with the sociology of knowledge, urban sociology and theories of modernity, and draws on qualitative and ethnographic methods. I am the author of Regulating Difference: Religious Diversity and Nationhood in the Secular West (Rutgers University Press, 2020) and Faith in the Time of AIDS: Religion, Biopolitics and Modernity in South Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Doing global sociology for me means to explore how even vastly different empirical findings, gathered in different parts of the world, may speak to shared conceptual and theoretical concerns; to examine the ways in which uninterrogated ethnocentric assumptions may block the way to theoretical progress, and to uncover the historicity of knowledge production while remaining faithful to sociology’s emancipatory promises.
