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Silke Steets is a professor of General Sociology and Sociological Theory at the Technical University of Berlin. She is also the  co-spokesperson for the CRC 1265 »Re-figuration of Spaces«. Her research interests include urban sociology, the sociology of space and architecture, the sociology of religion, sociological theory, interpretive research methods, and the history of sociology, especially the sociology of knowledge.

Silke received her doctorate from TU Darmstadt in 2007 under Martina Löw. In her thesis she reconstructed the spatial practices of members of Leipzig’s cultural and creative industries. The work was published in 2008 under the title »Wir sind die Stadt!« by Campus. In her Habilitation thesis »Der sinnhafte Aufbau der gebauten Welt«, completed in 2013 and published by Suhrkamp in 2015, Silke developed a knowledge-sociological approach to architecture extending Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s »The Social Construction of Reality« (1966) to the built world.

From 2017 to 2019, Silke was a Heisenberg Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Culture at the University of Leipzig. In 2019, she was appointed to the Chair of Sociological Theory at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg. In 2025, she moved to the Technical University of Berlin. She spent several months as a guest scholar at the Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs at Boston University (2012), the School of Economic, Political and Policy Sciences at UT Dallas (2018–19), the KFG »Multiple Secularities« at the University of Leipzig (2021–22), and the KFG »Religion and Urbanity« at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt (2025).

Silke is an elected member of the Council of the German Sociological Association (DGS) and belongs to the DGS sections Sociology of Knowledge (on the board since 2021), Sociology of Culture, Sociology of Religion, Urban and Regional Sociology (2011-2015 as deputy spokesperson), and the working group Sociology of Architecture. In 2018, she was appointed to the Cloud-Cuckoo-Land advisory board. Together with Hubert Knoblauch, she directs the subproject »B02: Control/Space: The Spatiality of Digital Infrastructures in Contexturs, Maps and Discourses« in the SFB 1265 »Re-Figuration of Spaces«.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS IN ENGLISH

  • Farías, Ignacio / Steets, Silke / Gansterer, Nikolaus (2025) (Hg.):
    Atlas of Spatial Figures. Berlin: Jovis. Open Access.
  • Knoblauch, Hubert / Steets, Silke (2022): »Here Is Looking at You«: Relational Phenomenology and the Problem of Mutual Gaze. In: Studia Phaenomenologica XXII. Gestures. S. 125–144.
  • Antony, Alexander/ Steets, Silke /Pfadenhauer, Michaela (2022):
    Politics of Crisis: Threatening and Defending Journalistic Expertise – A Processual Account. In: Symbolic Interaction. Online first. Open Access.