His name has already come up several times – in the Psi Report Germany and in the portrait of Ina Schmied-Knittel – so it is time for the man himself: Michael Schetsche (born 1956), sociologist and political scientist, head of department at the IGPP since 2002 and adjunct professor at the University of Freiburg. He is the theorist behind the Freiburg social research on the extraordinary – and the sociologist who seriously thinks through what contact with a non-human intelligence would mean for our society.
Career: from the centre of the discipline
Schetsche's career began far from any frontier research: political science at the Free University of Berlin, doctorate and habilitation in sociology at the University of Bremen, then a private lectureship there. His disciplinary home is the sociology of knowledge and media – the question of how societies determine what counts as knowledge, how patterns of interpretation arise and how media spread them. In May 2002 he took over the leadership of the cultural and social science department of the IGPP; in parallel he teaches as adjunct professor at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Freiburg. This double anchoring is remarkable: a frontier-areas researcher with an unbroken position in ordinary academic life.
The tool: sociology of knowledge
Schetsche's speciality is the view of the relation between knowledge and non-knowledge: who decides what a society is allowed to know, what counts as respectable and what as disreputable? That this view cuts in both directions is shown by his book "Konspiration – Soziologie des Verschwörungsdenkens" (with Andreas Anton and Michael K. Walter): a sober analysis of how conspiracy narratives work – without the short-circuit of declaring every uncomfortable question a conspiracy theory. The same symmetry marks the volume "Heterodoxie" (2018), edited with Schmied-Knittel, on "deviant knowledge": the border between science and non-science is no law of nature but is drawn, defended and shifted by people – a theme that recurs on this site from the power logic of hidden knowledge to the question of "majority vs. experts".
Everyday miracles: the empirical basis
Most tangible for our readers is his empirical work: with Eberhard Bauer he edited the 2003 volume "Alltägliche Wunder", and with Ina Schmied-Knittel he was responsible in it for the Psi Report Germany – the representative survey showing that around three quarters of Germans report at least one exceptional experience. The approach behind it carries, in Schetsche's work, a programmatic name: reflexive anomalistics – an anomalistics that always investigates both at once: the reported phenomena and society's handling of them. One studies the haunting, and at the same time what a culture makes of the haunting.
Exosociology: the emergency of the radically other
His most idiosyncratic research field Schetsche himself co-founded: exosociology. With Andreas Anton he published "Die Gesellschaft der Außerirdischen – Einführung in die Exosoziologie" ("The Society of Extraterrestrials – An Introduction to Exosociology", Springer 2019) – the social-science working-through of the question of what contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence would mean for human societies: who speaks for humanity? How do institutions, religions, markets react? Which contact scenarios are conceivable, which dangerous? One may take this for science fiction – or for anticipatory sociology on a question whose probability nobody knows but whose consequences would outweigh all others. The thread to his other themes is obvious: it is always about a society's encounter with the radically other – whether it appears as a haunting report, as proscribed knowledge or as a signal from space.
Context
Schetsche is the theorist of the Freiburg style: where Schmied-Knittel counts and maps, he supplies the concepts – interpretation patterns, heterodoxy, reflexive anomalistics – with which the field can be thought through cleanly in the first place. For this site his work is doubly valuable: the numbers from "Alltägliche Wunder" carry our arguments, and his sociology of boundary-drawing explains why research into the extraordinary so often founders not on the data but on the sorting machine of the academic enterprise. Whoever wants to understand how forbidden knowledge is made, reads Schetsche.
Sources: The entry "Michael Schetsche" in the German Wikipedia (career, IGPP department leadership since 2002, research fields); his page at the Institute of Sociology of the University of Freiburg; Eberhard Bauer & Michael Schetsche (eds.), Alltägliche Wunder (Ergon, 2003); Michael Schetsche & Ina Schmied-Knittel (eds.), Heterodoxie. Konzepte, Traditionen, Figuren der Abweichung (Herbert von Halem, 2018); Michael Schetsche & Andreas Anton, Die Gesellschaft der Außerirdischen. Einführung in die Exosoziologie (Springer, 2019); Anton, Schetsche & Walter (eds.), Konspiration. Soziologie des Verschwörungsdenkens (Springer VS); supplemented by our portraits of Ina Schmied-Knittel and the IGPP.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection and the research link directory.