About Us – The Department

Sociology and Human Geography

(Global) society is facing fundamental challenges in becoming socially and ecologically sustainable. In our new department, which combines the previous areas of sociology and social and economic geography, we thus see the fundamental socio-ecological transformations of globalized societies as the central subject of our analyses, research, and reflections.

We consider the transformations of globalized societies as unevenly structured in space and time. This can be seen, for example, through different modernization paths, in contradicting digitization processes, through novel types of center-periphery structures, in phenomena reflecting the dissolution of spatial/ temporal boundaries and evolving geopolitical power structures. These and other dynamics change local and remote societal processes, shape individual and collective working and living conditions, and permeate the design of late-modern biographies and identities. 

The department analyzes the complex consequences of unevenly structured socio-ecological transformations: firstly, in their interwoven scales and secondly along the interconnected research perspectives of socio-ecological un/sustainability of production and reproduction, mobilities, migration, transnationalization, and dynamics of working and living conditions in and beyond Europe.