Postdoctoral Researchers
Sarah holds an M.A. in German philology and a B.A. in sociology from the University of Vienna. She was a research associate at the Institute of Sociololgy (Chair of Prof. Dr. Sighard Neckel) at the J.W. Goethe University Frankfurt am Main and the University of Hamburg. In 2021 she completed her PhD in sociology at the University of Hamburg with a dissertation entitled “Gefühlstechniken. Eine Soziologie emotionaler Selbstvermessung/Technologies of Feeling. A Sociology of Emotional Self-Quantification” (2024). She is also co-editor of Un-Wohl-Gefühle: Eine Analyse gegenwärtiger Befindlichkeiten (transcript, 2016) and Die Gesellschaft der Nachhaltigkeit: Umrisse eines Forschungsprogramms (transcript, 2018). Among her research interests are cultural sociology, sociology of emotions and sociology of literature. Her current research focuses on sentimentality as a concept for the social sciences and urban exploring as an aesthetic practice of deliberately experiencing (and photographing) abandoned premises.
Project: Doing Sentimentality. A Cultural Sociology of the Sentimental Using the Example of Urban Exploring
The project aims to analytically sharpen the concept of the sentimental for the social and cultural sciences by basically adopting a cultural sociological perspective. To this end, a theoretical definition of the concept will be carried out that is sensitive to linguistic and cultural history: Firstly, the concept of the sentimental will be related to other concepts from the field of emotion research (e.g. emotion or affect); secondly, an analysis of the semantic field of the sentimental will be undertaken (e.g. its relation to neighbouring or opposite concepts), and thirdly, the sentimental will be framed as doing sentimentality from the perspective of practice theory in combination with central insights of the sociology of emotions. This basic theoretical definition with the aim of elaborating central conceptual dimensions and analytical gains of the sentimental is developed in close dialogue with an empirical case study on urban exploring. In urban exploring as an aesthetic practice of deliberately experiencing (and photographing) abandoned premises, the production (and reception) of sentimental codes, according to a central premise of the project, becomes observable ‚in the making‘.
For more on publications, talks, and teaching: https://www.soziologie.phil.fau.de/person/sarah-pritz/