Hubert Knoblauch


Hubert Knoblauch is a German sociologist, he is known for his work on Sociology of knowledge, Sociology of Religion, Qualitative research and Videography.

Biography

Knoblauch has a degree in Sociology from the University of Konstanz where he also did his PhD. He did research and taught among others at the University of California at Berkeley, King’s College London, the Universities of Konstanz, Zurich, Bern and Vienna. From 1996 he was a Heisenberg scholar of the German Research Association. In 2000 he became Professor in Religious Studies at the Theological Faculty of the University of Zurich. Since 2002 he is Professor of General Sociology/Theories of Modern Societies at the Technical University of Berlin.

Works

His texts are published in 10 languages and cover the sociology of knowledge, communication, contemporary religion, death and dying and video analysis. He is member of the Council of the DGS and had many positions within the ESA, e.g. Chair of the RN Sociology of Culture.

Research methodology and theoretical orientation

In his research Knoblauch focusses on various fields within theoretical and empirical sociology. He developed his own approach to the investigation of social interaction called focused ethnography. In contrast to “classic” ethnography this does not include prolonged stays in foreign cultures, but relies on video recordings of specialized fields within the researchers own society. The combination between video analysis and focused ethnography was elaborated as “videography”.
Another major field of his work is the sociology of religion, where he advocates for a broad understanding of the role of religion in modern society. Building on Luckmann’s “invisible religion”, he was one of the first to analyse the new forms of spirituality and developed the idea of a mediatized, event- and experience based “popular religion”.
Next to his contribion in re-establishing the sociology of knowledge in German speaking sociology, communication was a crucial reference point for his work. While he analysed communication processes already in his dissertation on dowsing and divination, in his habilitation thesis “Kommunikationskultur: Die kommunikative Konstrutkion kultureller Kontexte” he elaborated a theoretical framework which came to be known as “Communicative Constructivism”. Based on “The Social Construction of Reality” by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, this approach includes bodily performances and material “objectivations” as “the missing analytical link which allows one to turn social into communicative action”. Without being reduced to speech acts, “communicative action" becomes “the basic process in the social construction of reality”.

Publications (selection)