Textbook Practices: Reading Texts, Touching Books, in: Bock, A./Fuchs, E. (eds.): Palgrave Handbook of Textbook Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2018 (with Tobias Röhl).

Die Schulbuchentwicklung als sozio-materieller Aushandlungsprozess, conference: “Das Schulbuch als Wissensmedium”, University of Mainz, November 2014 (with Tobias Röhl)

German Society for Sociology

Contemporary physics is often confronted with the empirical unavailability of its objects. Particularly in the areas that deal with the theoretical problem of the unified description of quantum physics and gravity (quantum gravity), the theoretically assumed entities are often beyond possible experiments. Mathematics as the central modeling and cognitive instrument of theoretical physics is given an additional boost here: not only do the objects of physical interest first emerge from mathematically formulated theories, but mathematical theories and signs represent the only access to these objects.
The empirical-theoretical doctoral dissertation examines the cognitive practice of theoretical physics in line with sociological laboratory studies. Theoretical work is thus not understood here as a purely “intellectual” activity; instead, the social character of research practice and the constitutive significance of sign systems and cultural techniques (representations, simulations, etc.) are taken into account empirically and analytically. At the same time, the work does not make theoretical-physical thinking disappear as an object through its complete dissolution into social and symbolic practices, but takes it seriously in terms of the sociology of knowledge against the background of its mediated nature.