Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Institut für Sozialwissenschaften

Craig Calhoun
New York University

Craig Calhoun is a famous American sociologist and well-known advocate of using social science to address issues of public concern. He is president of the Social Science Research Council, University Professor of the Social Sciences at New York University and Director of NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge. Since October 2010, Craig Calhoun is Einstein Visiting Fellow at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin.

After receiving his doctorate from Oxford University, Calhoun taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill from 1977 to 1996. He was Dean of the Graduate School and the founding Director of the University Center for International Studies. He has also taught at the Beijing Foreign Studies University, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, and the Universities of Asmara, Khartoum, Oslo, and Oxford. Calhoun's own empirical research has ranged from Britain and France to China and three different African countries. His study of the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 resulted in the prize-winning book, Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (California, 1994). Among his other works are Nationalism (Minnesota, 1997), Critical Social Theory: Culture, History, and the Challenge of Difference (Blackwell, 1995), and several edited collections including Habermas and the Public Sphere (MIT, 1992), Hannah Arendt and the Meaning of Politics (Minnesota, 1997), Understanding September 11 (New Press, 2002), and Lessons of Empire (New Press, 2005). He was also editor in chief of the Oxford Dictionary of the Social Sciences. In more than ninety articles, he has also addressed the impact of technological change; the organization of community life; the relationship among tort law, risk, and business organizations; the anthropological study of education, kinship, and religion; and problems in contemporary globalization. Calhoun's work has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

The Einstein Research Project

The Einstein Research Project will meet regularly this academic year with a small team of graduate students focusing on the themes of „Good Strangers“ and „Infrastructure.“

Good Strangers
Relations among strangers are crucial to many dimensions of contemporary life. They shape the ways ethnic differences are (or aren’t) bridged in multicultural cities, the social nature of international humanitarian interventions or business collaborations, and the interaction of face-to-face and mediated sociability in the public sphere. They are fundamental to all successful social organization on scales larger than local communities and personal networks. Yet to a large extent, sociology has based thinking about social relationships overwhelmingly on close personal relationships: friendship, family, community. Relationships with strangers are approached as attenuated versions of personal relations. This project attempts to rethink relational sociology with more attention to the implications of relations among strangers. This links questions about the dynamics of interaction to larger scale questions about structural relations, reliance on cultural categories, and demands for different sorts of information, whether in markets, or politics, or even religion. The project thus seeks to integrate a more or less “micro” understanding of the practical accomplishment of such relations with a more “macro” understanding of the contexts larger structures involved. This means asking empirical questions about how relations among strangers are accomplished and organized. The project starts by examining practical norms for “good” stranger interactions – in action, not in abstract deliberations - from what is appropriate to do in a park or discuss in a coffee shop to whether it is legitimate to shoot those stopped at a roadblock in Israel’s occupied territories or Afghanistan. Second, it addresses the work of formal organizations in mediating between groups (e.g., organizations advocating for Turks in Berlin or Catholic churches providing services to Latin American immigrants). Third, it seeks to understand and evaluate efforts to change the deep-rooted production of normative understandings and embodied practices (their habituses) whether in the context of migration, or education, or the training of soldiers or humanitarian workers for international deployment. And finally it asks how people interrelate their use of various media with their face-to-face interpersonal relationships, and how this relates to developing or changing ideas of one’s own group or others.
 

The Infrastructures of Social Organization

All social life depends on infrastructures – starting with language. “Infrastructures” here means simply the “structures” on which other dimensions of social organization and interaction rest. Once created, infrastructures are one source of the relative stability and autonomy of the social, constraining individual action at the same time that they enable it. But of course infrastructures deteriorate, change, and are sometimes rendered obsolete by innovations. Many of the most basic infrastructures are systems based on material technologies. Familiar examples include transportation, communications, power and energy, and waste. Modern cities, states and “globalization” are inconceivable without such infrastructures. They are basic to material production and circulation of goods, to managing relations with “nature”, and to the interaction of different geographical settings. None of these infrastructures is simply and entirely material, however; all involve socio-technical systems. They depend in varying degrees on culturally mediated human understanding and on socially organized human effort to create and maintain them. In addition, there are a variety of less material or technological infrastructures. I’ve already mentioned language, and indeed the infrastructure here goes beyond grammar, syntax, and semantics to dictionaries, spell-checkers, and authoritative institutions for determining when a word is “French enough” to be legitimate. We might also think of the monetary and financial systems. These depend to some degree on technology, but also on elaborate cultural understandings, legal conventions, and algorithms enabling semi-automated trading. Infrastructures of knowledge span books to libraries to Wikipedia; scientific laboratories to professional associations to universities. This project seeks first to trace the role of infrastructures in the social organization of the modern era and in contemporary social change. One aim is simply to put the idea and material influence of infrastructures more clearly at the center of social science attention. Clearly, many infrastructures are noticed by social scientists, though not always conceptualized as such. Indeed, infrastructures are relatively easy to ignore when they are stable – and their importance is obscured when technologies are made glamorous by studying them only as technological innovation and not as infrastructures-in-the-making. Complementing the overall account of infrastructures, the empirical focus of this project is on the infrastructures that sustain and help constitute urban life. This means not just cities as distinct formal units, but the relationship among population centers and countryside, and both spatially compact and long-distance connections. Urban infrastructures include the “built environment” but also transformed “nature”. From streets to parks to grand plazas and buildings they offer spaces that enable or constrain social interaction.