Daniel Witte is a Fellow of the Kolleg from April 2024 to March 2025.
Vita
Dr Daniel Witte is a sociologist. After studying sociology, political science and psychology at the Universities of Cologne and Bonn, he initially worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Political Science and Sociology at the University of Bonn, where he received his doctorate in sociology in 2012. From 2010 to 2022, he was Research Coordinator and Deputy Managing Director of the Käte Hamburger Centre for Advanced Study in the Humanities "Law as Culture" at the University of Bonn. From 2019 to 2020, he was Interim Professor for Sociology with a Special Focus on Sociological Theory and History of Social Thought at the Institute of Sociology at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, and in 2023 he was a Visiting Professor at the Harry Radzyner Law School at Reichman University, Herzliya, Israel. He has also been a visiting researcher at the Departamento de Sociología y Comunicación at the Universidad de Salamanca, the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs at Georgetown University, Washington, D.C., and the Centre européen de sociologie et de science politique (CESSP) at the University of Paris-Panthéon-Sorbonne (CNRS/EHESS), Paris. Prior to his fellowship at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg "Legal Unity & Pluralism", he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences "Multiple Secularities – Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities" at Leipzig University. Daniel Witte is spokesperson for the Sociological Theory section and an elected member of the board of the German Sociological Association. His research interests include sociological theory and relational sociology, theories of social differentiation and comparative differentiation research, comparative macrosociology, globalisation and transnationalisation as well as the intersections and interactions between law, religion and politics in a global comparative perspective.
Research Project
Normative Challenges at the Boundaries of Law: Critique of Law, Justification Strategies and Struggles for Legitimacy in the “Reichsbürger” Movement and Climate Activism
The research project deals with the question of the legal unity and pluralism from the perspective of sociological theory, focusing on conflictual processes of demarcation, criticism and the stabilisation of boundaries between different social spheres. In this context, "law" is understood as a fundamentally contested category whose definition and demarcation from other areas of society varies greatly in historical and comparative terms. From this perspective, the controversial issues of normative and "legal" pluralism, which have been further intensified under the conditions of global modernity, are always also the arena for social conflicts about the concept and limits of law. In this broader theoretical context, the project is concerned with heteronomous normative spaces that emerge at the boundaries of state law and partially beyond these boundaries, while at the same time being constitutively dependent on their references to the law. Using two current case studies, social conflicts over the classification and attribution of these spaces and their relationship to state law will be analysed: using the example of the German "Reichsbürger" scene and the "Last Generation" movement as well as their US equivalents, the "Sovereign Citizens" and the "Declare Emergency" movement.
Selected Publications
Witte, Daniel (in print): Differenzierungskulturen: Elemente einer praxeologischen Komparatistik gesellschaftlicher Differenzierungsmuster, in: Differenzierung und Integration. Zur Ausdifferenzierung der Differenzierungstheorie (Arbeitstitel) [Sonderband der Zeitschrift für Theoretische Soziologie, hrsg. von Marc Mölders, Joachim Renn und Jasmin Siri].
Witte, Daniel & Andreas Schmitz (2021): Relational Sociology on a Global Scale: Perspectives from Field Theory on Cross‐Cultural Comparison and the Re‐Figuration of Space(s), in: Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung, Vol. 22, No. 3, Thematic Issue “The Refiguration of Spaces and Cross-Cultural Comparison II”, hrsg. von Nina Baur, Stephen Mennell & Angela Million.
Schmitz, Andreas & Daniel Witte (2020): National, International, Transnational, and Global Fields – Theoretical Clarifications and Methodological Implications, in: Christian Schmidt-Wellenburg/Stefan Bernhard (Hrsg.): Charting Transnational Fields. Methodology for a Political Sociology of Knowledge, London/New York: Routledge, S. 79–97.
Schneickert, Christian, Andreas Schmitz & Daniel Witte (2020): Das Feld der Macht. Eliten – Differenzierung – Globalisierung, Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
Witte, Daniel (2015): Umstrittene Grenzen: Das Feld der Macht als Ort von Deutungskämpfen um Recht und Religion, in: Werner Gephart/Jan Christoph Suntrup (Hrsg.): Rechtsanalyse als Kulturforschung II, Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, S. 357–391.
Witte, Daniel (2014): Auf den Spuren der Klassiker. Pierre Bourdieus Feldtheorie und die Gründerväter der Soziologie, Konstanz/München: UVK.