Dr Monika Kraus
Lecturer in Sociology
Research Interests
I am interested in specialised practices in a variety of settings. I am fascinated by the benefits and costs of specialisation and am interested in comparative questions about fields of specialised practice: How do we conceptualise and how do we explain some of the similarities, and how do we explain differences? I ask by what mediations specialised practices are linked to other practices, and how they do or do not add up to meaningful wholes. I have worked on management practices shared by humanitarian NGOs. I have studied the history of the journalistic field in the US. I have also written on playwriting, and on psychoanalysis. I am particularly interested also in how attention to specialised and organizational practices recasts how we understand social order on a global level.
Recent publications:
Monika Kraus. 2011. 'Reporting and the Transformations of the Journalistic Field: US News Media, 1890-2000', Media, Culture and Society 33 (1): 89-104.
Monika Kraus. 2010. 'Accounting for State Intervention. The Social Histories of Beneficiaries', Qualitative Sociology 33 (4): 533-547.
Monika Kraus. 2008. 'Undocumented Migrants: An Arendtian Perspective', European Journal of Political Theory 7(3): 3A31-348. Reprinted in Brad Blitz and Carline Sawyer (eds)2010. Displaced, Undocumented and Unwanted. Comparative Analysis of Statelessness in the European Union. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Monika Kraus. 2007. 'Practicing Authorship: The Case of Brecht's Plays' in: Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett (ed.): Practicing Culture. Oxford: Routledge.
Monika Kraus and Oskar Negt.2006. 'The Production of Counter Publics and the Counter-Publics of Production. Interview with Oskar Negt.' European Journal of Social Theory 9/1: 119-128.