Soziologie

Dr. Alejandro Esguerra, former post-doc in the AG Straßheim, has won the 2026 Jeffrey Friedman Prize from the Ideas, Knowledge and Politics section of the American Political Science Association (APSA). His book, 'The Politics of Beginning', University of Michigan Press was selected as the best recent book on the role of ideas or knowledge claims in politics.

On the book: Timber companies, Indigenous communities, and environmental activists, many of them bitter adversaries, somehow built the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) together. How? Using live recordings of the FSC’s 1993 founding assembly, the book reconstructs this constitutional moment from the inside. It shows that private authority isn’t handed down. It is translated, performed, and contested by real people in a room. To tell that story, Esguerra developed a dramaturgical methodology and a mechanism of translation, rooted in Actor-Network Theory. At a moment when the environmental crisis demands radical rethinking of how societies govern human–nature relations, this book reveals the fragile, contested conditions under which new forms of authority are born. Made possible by the open-access funding of Bielefeld University, the book can be down-loaded here https://lnkd.in/ezpzyRRQ