Katja Klebig

Dr. Katja Klebig is a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Sociology, Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, working at the Chair of Social Structure Analysis of Modern Societies led by Prof. Reinhold Sackmann. Since 2018 she has held continuous academic appointments, currently as a postdoc since December 2022, and is actively involved in both research and teaching.

Education:

• 2011 Magister Artium in Sociology (major), Political Science and Philosophy (minors), University of Potsdam
• 2012-2020 Doctoral studies funded by the Hans-Böckler-Stiftung, dissertation on stratificatory differentiations in elite vs. non-elite study programs, successfully defended July 2020

Research interests revolve around sociology of education, qualitative social research, social inequality, milieu and habitus analysis, and rural regions. She applies Bourdieusian approaches to investigate how student milieus match academic field cultures, how teachers handled distance education during the pandemic, and how social inequality is structurally anchored in higher education.

Her publications trace sustained engagement with elite education, student habitus patterns, and the social space of academic disciplines, culminating in a 2021 monograph on student milieus and disciplinary fit. A recent collaborative article examines teachers’ action dispositions amid COVID-19 and their implications for milieu-specific educational strategies.

Teaching & supervision: She offers seminars such as "Economy, State and Society: Shrinking Regions" and welcomes thesis supervision requests in the sociology of education, qualitative methods, social inequality, milieu and habitus research, and rural sociology.

Research projects: She currently leads a project on schools and COVID-19, analysing guided interviews with teachers from different Länder and school types using habitus-hermeneutics to uncover links between pandemic teaching practices and social inequality. Earlier, she was associated with the DFG Research Group "Mechanisms of Elite Formation in the German Education System".