Faculty
Margarethe Kusenbach
Professor
CONTACT
Office: CPR 221
Phone: (813) 974-2595
Email
BIO
In 1993, I moved to Los Angeles to pursue a Ph.D. degree in sociology. I had already earned an M.A. degree in sociology in my native country, Germany, under the supervision of Thomas Luckmann, co-author of the classic "The Social Construction of Reality," and was looking for more training in interpretive theories and qualitative methods鈥攂esides looking for adventure far from home. When I left Germany in my mid-twenties, I never imagined that I would live in LA for many years, start a family, pursue a career in the US, settle down in Florida, and become an American citizen--in short, create a new home for myself on the other side of the Atlantic. Alas, here I am! While I鈥檓 more of an "accidental" immigrant to the US compared with many others, I am a first generation immigrant nonetheless and it is not completely surprising that the sociological subareas of space and place, identity, and emotions鈥攁nd more specifically issues of "home" and "belonging" at their intersection鈥攈ave emerged as my primary research interests, at least for the time being.
Having been a typical graduate student and junior scholar, my substantive interests within sociology have shifted considerably over the years: from conversational structures to lived experience, from gender to urban neighborhoods, from deviance to disasters. Like most colleagues, I have arrived at my current research topics by taking the long road, and I鈥檓 looking forward to some more traveling in the future. However, what has remained constant throughout my scholarly journey is my fascination with learning, applying, and further developing interpretive鈥攐r what some call "symbolic interactionist"鈥攖heories , and a lingering curiosity about qualitative, and especially ethnographic, research methods. These related perspectives have always been my sociological home, long before I discovered "home" as an actual research topic.
In my case, b