Young Talent Award of the Theory Section of the German Sociological Association goes to Martin Repohl

The jury of the Theory Section of the German Sociological Association (DGS) has honoured Martin Repohl's doctoral dissertation "Die Beziehungsqualität der materiellen Welt. Perspektiven einer weltbeziehungssoziologischen Analyse von Materialität" (published in 2024 by Nomos) with the Young Talent Award. The certificate was presented on 25 September during the general meeting of the theory section at the DGS Congress in Duisburg.

Martin Repohl was a doctoral candidate at the Max-Weber-Kolleg and wrote his dissertation there, which has already been honoured with the Max Weber Prize for Young Researchers. The study offers an extremely complex and interesting approach to analysing the question of materiality from a more sociological and socio-theoretical perspective and thus to work out material relational qualities. The simple question of how we produce things and what they do to us is analysed here beyond individual objects into a social theory of world relations. He describes how the material world that we create for ourselves structures our possibilities for world relations and what experiences of resonance and alienation follow from this in times of transformation. The book thus not only presents an empirical analysis of material relational qualities; it unfolds a meta-theoretical understanding of the analytical possibilities and limits of taking materiality into account in sociological theory.

Using concrete examples (e.g. discount furniture, smart homes, recycled plastic, mushroom material and nuclear waste), Repohl succeeds not only in asserting the effectiveness and impact of things, but also in demonstrating these cases and thus making them accessible to differentiated theorisation. In doing so, he combines various theoretical approaches, be it neo-materialist theories, Hartmut Rosa's "sociology of world relations", phenomenological approaches or debates on the Anthropocene. In articulating these approaches and his own case studies, Repohl succeeds in creating his own reflected position on the material turn: a sociological approach of his own that places material relational qualities at the centre. Overall, the book offers an extremely interesting and useful conceptual toolkit for further research, as the laudator, Helge Schwierz, points out.

"We congratulate Martin Repohl on this well-deserved award and wish him continued success on his academic career path," says Hartmut Rosa, Director of the Max-Weber-Kolleg, who supervised the work.