Welcome to our Work Group Socialisation Research!

Prof. Dr. Alexandra König has headed the Work Group Socialisation Research since Winter Semester 2017/2018.

Socialisation processes are at the heart of the work group's research and teaching. Our starting point is actors who move within structured possibilities and whose actions confirm, reinterpret, or even expand opportunity structures. This is always linked to the question of how social order and thus unequal order is created in an individualized society.

We examine socialisation processes in different phases of life (especially childhood and adolescence) and socialisation settings (family, school, the workplace, university, peers), as well as on the basis of diverse objects (taste, education, professional fields). Central to this is an interactionist and inequality-analytical perspective.

We are currently studying from different perspectives the question of what is understood as “good parenting” or “good childhood” in societies. We approach this question primarily in two DFG projects, using examples of different phenomena: Firstly, in the EliA project (Parenthood in the Adoption Process – Elternschaft im Adoptionsprozess), we are investigating how “good parents” for a child given up for adoption are sought in the adoption process. Secondly, in the TraNa project (Self-Positioning in transnational spaces - Children's narrations and narrations about children living in transnational families), we are looking at how children in Poland whose parents work (temporarily) abroad experience their transnational family life and how they position themselves in the transnational space. The work group explores this and much more – in research as well as in teaching.

Teaching in Winter Semester 2024/2025