Our esteemed and painfully missed colleague PD Dr. Saša Bosančić has posthumously received the Thomas A. Herz Award at the 26th Congress of the German Sociological Association in Bielefeld for his innovative contributions to interpretive subjectivation research. His further developments in the sociology of knowledge, discourse and subjectivation analysis have left a broad research approach for analyzing subject positions, subject relations, and subjectivities.

PD Dr. Saša Bosančić developed the Interpretative Subjectivization Analysis (ISA) against the background of his dissertation on the "Subjectivization of Unskilled Workers" written in Augsburg and published in 2014. In this empirical study, PD Dr. Saša Bosančić addressed whether and how unskilled workers embrace the much-discussed concept of the 'entrepreneurial self' (U. Bröckling) and how they relate to it. The idea of 'subjectification' comes from the context of social science discourse research, particularly from the work of Michel Foucault and the sociological discourse analysis of knowledge developed in Augsburg. The starting point is the discourse-analytical observation that in public, discursive conflicts, specific subject models are established. Within the framework of organizational and institutional structures, they confront individuals with specific expectations regarding their actions. Subjectivation research now asks what individuals make relevant for themselves from these public 'invocations' and how this happens. In his postdoctoral thesis submitted to the Faculty of Philosophy and Social Sciences in Sociology, entitled "Knowledge, Self, and Society. The Research Perspective of Interpretative Subjectivation Analysis," he provided the systematic theoretical-methodological foundation of this approach as a research program.

Beyond his scientific work, Saša Bosančić was engaged in collaborative projects; among other things, he co-founded the Network on Subjectivation Research in 2018 and built it up with a critical, sharp, and always integrative mind.

Prof. Dr. Reiner Keller officially accepted the award. He gave a laudatory speech in which he recalled the multifaceted scientific engagements of our colleague and his outstanding research personality, which had a high sensitivity for critical questions concerning social inequality. He finished his laudatory speech hoping that Saša Bosančić's unique spirit would continue in future empirical research on subjectification.

The prize was funded by Claudia and Trutz von Trotha and is worth 5,000 euros. Since 2014, the prize has been awarded every two years to two winners whose sociological work makes an innovative contribution to qualitative social research and empirically grounded theory building. The German organization arbeiterkind.de received the prize money.

Under the following link, you can find a short review of the award ceremony [in German]:
https://www.soziopolis.de/bielefelder-splitter-i-montag.html