Sebastian Matthias Schlerka

I am a sociologist working at the RDC Qualiservice at Bremen University. My sociological interests are sociological theory, politics and societal differentiation, the relation between religion and politics, and text mining methods.

I wrote my dissertation on the perception of Islam and Muslims by members of the German Bundestag at the Faculty for Sociology at Bielefeld University. As part of my dissertation, I created a fully keyworded database of about 2000 German parliamentary documents and protocols mentioning Islam or Muslims that were issued between 1990 and 2009. The database is accessible as a Zotero group library to which I add interested researchers on request.

Before working on my dissertation, I earned my M.A. in sociology at Bielefeld University in 2014. In my master’s thesis, I created a praxeological approach to secularisation that got published as a book. In 2011, I earned my B.A. in sociology and history.