Rogers Brubaker

Rogers Brubaker (born 1956 in Evanston , Illinois ) is an American sociologist . He is Professor and UCLA Foundation Chair at UCLA .

Life

Brubaker studied sociology at Columbia University and Harvard, and sociology and political science at the University of Sussex . From 1988 to 1991 he was a Junior Fellow at Harvard University, and since 1991 he has taught at UCLA. He received a MacArthur Fellowship (1994–1999), a Presidential Young Investigator Award from the American National Science Foundation and fellowships from the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (1995–1996) of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1999–2000) and from the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin (2006–2007). In 2009 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In addition to English , Brubaker is fluent in German , French and Hungarian and can read Dutch , Spanish , Romanian and Russian .

research

Brubaker's research covers social theory, citizenship , nationalism , ethnicity, and sociological theory. His first book explores the role of rationality in Max Weber's work ; his essays on Pierre Bourdieu made him better known in the English-speaking world. His book Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany , published in 1992, addressed the great differences in the granting of citizenship to migrants in France and Germany. It paved the way for many studies on various concepts of citizenship. In Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe , published in 1996, he compares the Eastern European nationalisms of the 1990s with those of the period after the First World War . In several essays, which were summarized in the anthology Ethnicity withour Groups , he criticizes the prevailing approach to topics such as nation, ethnicity and tries to develop alternative methods. In 2006 he wrote a study on Romanian and Hungarian nationalism in Transylvania . In the 2006 book Nationalist politics and everyday ethnicity in a Transylvanian town , Brubaker and other authors apply the constructivist approach to nationalism research to the city of Cluj , where they were staying for research purposes.

His latest works address the context for the current politics of difference: in Grounds for Difference the return of social inequality , biology and the “ sacred ”. In Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities he deals with the equation of “ transgender ” and transracial (roughly: belonging to different “races”) in public debates. He is currently writing about the pan-European and transatlantic populist movement.

reception

His works Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany and Ethnicity withour Groups have been translated into German, the German titles are: “Staats-Bürger” and “Ethnität ohne Gruppen”. In “Staats-Bürger” he addresses the difference between the German ius sanguinis and the French ius soli when granting citizenship and shows that only a supplement to the ius sanguinis with the ius soli would make Germany a “normal” western nation-state which, out of principle and law, overcomes the “homogeneous” in favor of the “heterogeneous nation state” ( Dahrendorf ). A people creates itself as a state people through the adoption of a constitution by a democratically elected constituent assembly . Independent of this act of constitution, people and nation have no existence, they are first and foremost legal concepts. In France, the people of the state are sovereign of the people, but the state is not a people's state. The latter is a German ideology that goes back to Herder's concept of the “Volksgeist” and is still the German special path in the history of public law. This is a special path that is incompatible with a modern constitutional state and modern democracy in itself.

In “Ethnicity Without Groups” Brubaker addresses the representation of ethnic , national and racial groups in conflicts in journalism, politics and science. These are usually presented as self-contained groups, individual individual and social actors such as political or religious authorities are only rarely named; Brubaker calls this “groupism”. In this way, politicians and scientists take over the language of the fighting and contribute to the reification of ethnic groups, “peoples” and races. Brubaker, on the other hand, sees groups as dynamically constructed; they are products of repetitive and cumulative processes of categorizing, coding and interpreting. He shows that feelings of togetherness are not constants, but also vary within constructed groups. He calls on constructivist sociology to learn from cognitive psychology and ethnology by understanding ethnicity as a cognitive phenomenon, as a way of seeing and interpreting the world. The cognitive approach to ethnicity research that he advocates thus asks how, when and why people interpret social experiences in terms of ethnic, racial or national perspectives, rather than: "What is an ethnicity, race or nation?"

Works (selection)

• (1984). The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Social and Moral Thought of Max Weber , Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-04-301173-7
• (1992). Citizenship and nationhood in France and Germany , Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-13178-1
• (1996). Nationalism reframed: nationhood and the national question in the New Europe , Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-57649-9
• (2004). Ethnicity without groups , Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01539-5
• (2006). Nationalist politics and everyday ethnicity in a Transylvanian town , Princeton University Press. ISBN | 978-0-691-12834-4, review , Franz Sz. Horváth, Südost – Forschungen 67 (2008), pp. 551–556
• (2015). Grounds for difference , Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-74396-0
• (2016). Trans: Gender and Race in an Age of Unsettled Identities . Princeton University Press.
• Catalog of works on the UCLA website

Translations into German

• State Citizen . Germany and France in historical comparison; from the American by Wiebke Schmaltz; Junius Verlag, Hamburg 1994
• Ethnicity without groups . Hamburger Edition, Hamburg 2007, ISBN 9783936096842 . Translated from the English by Gabriele Gockel and Sonja Schuhmacher.

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} CV Rogers Brubaker , UCLA
2. ↑ Rogers Brubaker, Ph.D. , Fellow – Finder, Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin
3. ^ ^{A b} Rogers Brubaker, Professor of Sociology , UCLA website
4. ↑ Review , Franz Sz. Horváth, Südost – Forschungen 67 (2008), pp. 551–556
5. ↑ People's state or state people? , Hauke ​​Brunkhorst , Die Zeit, October 21, 1994
6. ^ Tinker groups , Andreas Eckert, Die Zeit, January 24, 2008
7. ^ Book presentation, Hamburger Verlag
8. ↑ Review note at Perlentaucher.de