Institutions, Politics and Power: A Hermeneutic Perspective - Prof. Andreas Glaeser (University of Chicago)

Andreas Glaeser is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Chicago. He works in the hermeneutic tradition of the social sciences eager to engage empirical work and theory development in a dialectical process. In this spirit his first book Divided in Unity: Identity, Germany and the Berlin Police (Chicago: 2000) develops a theory of identity formation processes while exploring the reasons why east and west Germans find it so hard to understand each other after political unification. His second book Political Epistemics: The Secret Police, the Opposition and the End of East German Socialism (Chicago: 2010) formulates a hermeneutic, knowledge-centric institutionalism to account for the dissolution of socialism in East Germany. His current research activities center around three topics: First a sociology of liberation which aims to bring a normative perspective back into the social sciences; second a study on the differences of social imaginaries across history and cultures; and third, the dynamics of economic knowledge making in the context of bubble economies.