Educated in economics, political science and sociology in Hamburg, London and Berlin, Peter Wagner has been academically active in various European countries, including Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Norway, as well as in the USA and South Africa. He was Research Fellow at the Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung, Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick and the University of Trento as well as Professor of Social and Political Theory at the European University Institute in Florence. Currently, he is Research Professor of Social Sciences at the Catalan Institute for Research and Advanced Studies (ICREA) and at the University of Barcelona as well as project director at Ural Federal University in Ekaterinburg.
Peter Wagner's research is based in comparative historical and political sociology, social and political theory, and sociology of the social sciences. It focuses on the identification and comparative analysis of different forms of social and political modernity and of the historical trajectories of modern societies. In this perspective, the term "modernity" does not signal a single and unique model of social organization, but rather variable interpretations of basic human problématiques in the light of specific historical experiences. It was initially applied to a comparative political sociology of European societies, and subsequently to transformations in the self-understanding of Europe. Over the past few years, it was elaborated further towards a "world-sociology", focusing on the tensions between struggles for autonomy and persisting forms of domination and exploring current possibilities of progress in the light of historical experiences in different world-regions, in particular the Global South and the regions of the BRICS societies.
Recent publications:
2019, with Aurea Mota, Collective action and political transformations. The entangled experiences of Brazil, South Africa and Europe, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
2017, with Bo Stråth, European modernity: a global approach, London: Bloomsbury.
2016, Progress. A reconstruction, Cambridge: Polity Press (translated into French, 2017; German, 2018, and Croat, in preparation).
2015, ed., The moral mappings of South and North, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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Created / Updated: 17 April 2019 / 17 April 2019