Prof. Dr. Manuela Boatcă awarded "Sociologist of the Month" by Current Sociology

September 1, 2017

Head of Global Studies Programme, Prof. Dr. Manuela Boatcă is awarded "Sociologist of the Month" by Current Sociology, one of the oldest sociology journals in the world. Current Sociology is a fully peer-reviewed, international journal that publishes original research and innovative critical commentary both on current debates within sociology as a developing discipline, and the contribution that sociologists can make to modern societies in a globalizing world.

From the Current Sociology Facebook Page: 

Meet Manuela Boatcă, our #SociologistOfTheMonth for September. She is a Professor of Sociology at the Institut für Soziologie of the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Germany, Head of School of the Global Studies Programme, and President of ISA's RC 56 (Historical Sociology). Here she tells us how she came to the field of sociology:

“I grew up in a white middle-class Romanian household during the last decade of Ceaușescu’s reign. My parents, who had come to Bucharest from rural parts of Moldavia to study, were teachers of Romanian literature and lovers of grammar and history who had had little to no opportunity to travel abroad. I got a degree in English and German languages and literatures in Bucharest at a time when the curriculum was being completely overhauled – we were the first generation to be allowed to read Orwell’s 1984 and Nabokov’s Lolita, which had been banned before 1989. But we were also the first generation of students who had a realistic chance of traveling to the countries whose languages and literatures we were studying, something that most of our professors, just like my parents, had never been able to do. After getting my degree, I therefore went to Germany to study sociology in order to get a better sense of what the “socio” in “sociolinguistics” that we had been taught as part of the study of languages was all about. It was not before I had obtained a PhD in sociology four years later that I acknowledged that I was a migrant and was in Germany to stay. I acquired increasing awareness of my lesser Europeanness in a Western European environment through the difficulties that the spelling of my last name posed to everyone outside of my country of birth and the uneasiness that my Romanian passport occasioned border authorities and myself. A research stay in the United States shortly before 9/11 made me acquainted with dependency theory, world-systems analysis and the modernity/coloniality perspective. Together, these approaches provided me with an analytical framework into which peripheral experiences and structural dependencies at the global level made perfect sense, as did their marginalisation in mainstream social theory. I therefore became interested in how imperial and colonial power relations affect present-day opportunities for global mobility, structure inequalities worldwide, and impact citizenships.”