Dr. Linus Westheuser
- Foto
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- Name
- Dr. Linus Westheuser
- Status
- Researcher
- linus.westheuser (at) hu-berlin.de
- Institution
- Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät → Institut für Sozialwissenschaften → Makrosoziologie
- Function / Working Area
- Researcher
- Visiting address
- Universitätsstraße 3b , Room 105
- Phone number
- +49 (0)30 2093-66625
- Mailing address
- Unter den Linden 6, 10099 Berlin
I am a postdoctoral researcher collaborating with Steffen Mau and Thomas Lux on the project "New Inequalities – New Cleavages? A Political Sociology of Contemporary Societies". My work bridges political and cultural sociology, looking at the role of identity, morality, and culture in transformations of political conflict structures. Inspired by neo-Bourdieusian cultural class analysis and cleavage theory, I am interested in cultural forms that mediate between social inequalities and political divides.
I hold a PhD from Scuola Normale Superiore in Florence. In my doctoral research, I mapped links between class, culture, and politics in contemporary Germany. Through Multiple Correspondence Analyses of survey data I studied how key ideological divides are rooted in social structure. Extensive in-depth interviewing allowed me to understand how diverging ideological leanings among two particularly central classes, production workers and middle class sociocultural professionals, are embedded in class-specific moral economies, social identities, and political habitus forms.
Before arriving at Humboldt, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Zurich’s Political Science Department and a visiting researcher at the International Inequalities Institute at London School of Economics. I got both my MA and BA from Humboldt’s Social Sciences department, with visits to King’s College London and the École Normale Supérieure in Cachan.
Publications
- 2022 – "Verletzte Ansprüche. Zur Grammatik des politischen Bewusstseins von ArbeiterInnen" (with Linda Beck), Berliner Journal für Soziologie: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11609-022-00470-0 (Open Access)
- 2022 – "Class Without Consciousness. The Politics of Demobilized Class Society", Special Issue of the Berliner Journal für Soziologie (with Donatella della Porta): https://link.springer.com/journal/11609/volumes-and-issues/32-2 (Open Access)
- 2022 – "This is not America: Politische Polarisierung in Deutschland als Schimäre", in: Forschungsjournal Soziale Bewegungen. https://doi.org/10.1515/fjsb-2022-0030
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2020 – "Populism as Symbolic Class Struggle. Homology, Metaphor, and English Ale", in Participation & Conflict 13(1) 2020: 256-283. http://siba-ese.unisalento.it/index.php/paco/article/download/21989/18561
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2020 – “The Symbolic Politics of Populism Re flects the Class Alliances it Attempts to Assemble.”, LSE British Politics and Policy Blog: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/the-class-politics-of-populism/
- 2019 – “The Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and the Great Recession” (Book Review), Mobilization 24(4): 531-2. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/343583540_Review_The_Tea_Party_Occupy_Wall_Street_and_the_Great_Recession
- 2018 – “Doing Gender”. Gender Glossary. https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:bsz:15-qucosa2-170183
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2015 – “Männer, Frauen und Stefan Hirschauer: Undoing Gender zwischen Praxeologie und Rhetorischer Modernisierung”, GENDER – Zeitschrift für Gesellschaft, Geschlecht und Kultur 3: 109-125