DFG project "Accounting and transformational effects in professional football." An Empirical-Ethnographic Study on the Sociology of Numerical and Data-Based Practices of Evaluation and Criticism" https://www.ku.de/accounting-im-profifussball

The book following the DFG project by Robert Schmidt, David Kempf, and Max Weigelin is now available via open-access.

"Performance comparisons and evaluative practices - sports as an instructive case of the sociology of evaluation" is a "cultural-scientific-practical analysis of social practices of evaluation, but also of categorization, comparison, quantification, and decision-making," which “has developed into a broad research field of sociological basic research over the last two decades.”

The project "Cybersecurity at Work" by Basil Wiesse examines social interconnections as well as the social theoretical and methodological implications of the "cybersecurity" field from a praxeological perspective. Cybersecurity encompasses a variety of strategies for the creation, maintenance, and critique of communication infrastructures. She demonstrates a comprehensive and problem-related sociologizing of the participants in a special way. A special focus of the project lies in the examination of the technoepistemic positioning of the field, its participation in and criticism of central societal decisions far beyond digital policy issues.

Publication in FIfF-Kommunikation:
Guagnin, Kocksch, Wiesse - Für eine De-Militarisierung von Cybersicherheit
available through: https://cloud.fiff.de/s/DX7xZenQ7jWp2ZB S. 36-41,

When people come together for rallies, demonstrations, strikes, blockades, encampments or occupations on streets, squares or other places of protest, this is when ‘the political’ is being enacted, performed, situated and placed. At the same time, however, the term Placings of the Political also refers to conceptual attempts to re-describe and conceptually re-locate political protest events in the discourse of the political and to place rallies, demonstrations, protest meetings and gatherings analytically at the very central point that, in a widespread and limited understanding of politics and public discourse, is occupied by other, more established and more exclusive places - e.g. the salons, the media or the parliaments. Political developments of the past two decades, which persist to the present day have launched astonishing careers of public places, streets, squares and transport hubs: Zuccotti Park, Gezi Park, Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol or Syntagma Square metonymically stand for the digitally networked protest and resistance movements as a whole and form the starting point of our research perspective. However, the increased political relevance of places is also documented in radical right-wing marches and rallies and - not least - in the wave of mass protests against the right.

In our research, protest events are primarily analyzed with reference to their auditory dimension. This allows the usual focus on external protest communication, i. e. on what is publicly presented, demanded, criticized and denounced in protests and demonstrations, to be exploratively redirected. We are particularly interested in the situational and audible communicative ‘inner life’ of gatherings and protest assemblies as it is produced and overheard by the participants. In this sense we focus on processes of political semiosis and articulation and we develop innovative ‘audio’-ethnographic research strategies to decode such phenomena. The theoretical background of the empirical explorations is formed by the debates on the public sphere, performative theories of assembly (Butler) and ‘spaces of appearance’ (Arendt) as well as radical-democratic ‘theories of the political’ (Lefort, Nancy, Rancière, Mouffe, Laclau etc.). Public meeting places, streets and squares form dense zones of political action that obey not only linguistic, deliberative and dialogical principles. These zones of density are the places in the world where the polis gathers, where participants emerge in front of an assembled general public and where political disputes and conflicts are realized performatively, bodily and affectively. We define assembly as an assemblage of co-present bodies and public objects around which a space of hearing and appearance stretches out. This space is characterized by proximity, intensity of communicative interactions, joint attention and an all-round hearing and being heard.  

Cf. a first publication of research results:
Schmidt, Robert: Situationalität und Verortung des Politischen. Eine praxeologische Forschungsskizze. (Situationality and placing of the political. A praxeological research sketch). In: Corsten, Michael (ed.): Praxis. Exercise. Understanding. Weilerswist (Velbrück Wissenschaft) 2021. p. 120-136.

DFG-funded Research Training Group "Practicing Place. Socio-Cultural Practices and Epistemic Configurations" (GRK 2589) Link

Current dissertation projects

Jakob Bierwagen: Dis-/Placings of Border - Ethnographic explorations in the context of the ‘Belarus Route’ Link: https://www.practicing.place/person/jakob-bierwagen/

Completed dissertations

David Kempf: Doing Realism. Practices of Realistic Representation: The Case of the Football Simulation "Football Manager." Baden-Baden: Nomos 2024.

Shruti Malik: Guided Walking Tours: A Practice of Place. KU Eichstätt 2024.