13.05.2025
“Work is half of life”? – Normality in the working society
We live in a working society: gainful employment is not only proof of our social background, it also plays a key role in determining social security, recognition and participation. When we talk about work in this context, we usually think of the regularly paid “normal employment relationship”. But work is much more than that: it is often unregulated and unpaid, and is also voluntary, illegal or forced.
Prof.’in Dr’in Tine Haubner takes you on a short journey through the various forms of work, its visible and less visible places. She will also ask what “normal work” actually is and how we define it and, last but not least, which work activities also exist outside of this mostly unquestioned normality in our working society.
Short biography of the speaker:
Prof. Dr. Tine Haubner is Junior Professor of Qualitative Methods at the Faculty of Health Sciences at Bielefeld University. She studied sociology, philosophy and psychology at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena.
After graduating, she worked for many years in the sociology of work and political sociology. In 2016, she received her doctorate in Jena with a dissertation on the exploitation of informal lay care work and was awarded the dissertation prize of the German Sociological Association and the Section for Labor and Industrial Sociology for her dissertation in 2018.
Between 2017 and 2023, she led two sociological research projects in Jena and conducted research on rural poverty as a research fellow at Pennstate University in Pennsylvania/USA between 2021 and 2022. Her research focuses on qualitative labor, welfare, health and inequality research.
Approximately two weeks after the lecture, a recording will be published on the Mittweida University of Applied Sciences YouTube channel. You will then also find the video on this website.
