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Portrait photo of Dr Jonathan Harth

Dr.

Jonathan Harth

Researcher

Faculty of Health (School of Medicine)  |  Chair of Sociology


Dr phil. Jonathan Harth studied sociology, philosophy and psychology at the Free University of Berlin and the University of Vienna and has been working as an academic staff member at the Chair of Sociology at Witten/Herdecke University since 2009.

His research specialisations include the sociology of digitalisation (in particular extended reality and sociality under conditions of machine intelligence), digital art production and the sociology of religion (Western Buddhism).

In addition to his work at the Chair of Sociology, Harth works on the project "Theatre of Extended Realities" (NRW funding programme Neue Wege), where he is dedicated to the conception and use of digital technologies in virtual and augmented theatre plays.

Latest information: jonathanharth.de

 


Teaching

  • The climate catastrophe in the context of social and personal displacement and responsibility (SS 2025)

  • Artificial intelligence and virtual agents - the future of human-machine interaction (WS 2024/2025)

     


Press expert for

Media presence (selection):

  • Love in the Metaverse, Hitchhiking through the Metaverse: Level 3. NRW-Forum Düsseldorf (23/06/2022).
  • The dream of virtual space - life in the metaverse. SWR2 Forum (22/06/2022).
  • The sweat of others. Sociologist Jonathan Harth on virtual body swapping, the pitfalls of Zoom calls and the possibilities and limits of VR theatre in conversation with Sabine Leucht. Theatre of Time, p. 17-22, April 2021.
  • Why the crisis came too early for virtual reality. Spiegel Online, 24 May 2020.
  • With glasses to paradise. Virtual reality between escaping reality and gaining reality. SWR2, 10.06.2018.
  • Art of Gaming - Ghost in the Machine, arte, 20.6.2017. Available online.

  • Virtual reality is becoming more and more real. Journeys into digital worlds are also changing analogue reality. Frankfurter Rundschau, 26/08/2017.

     


Further information

Awards and prizes:

  • "Best XR Gallery - Honourable Mention" (2025) for Knabe, Tore; Harth, Jonathan (2025): Edges of Identity. A Reverse Turing Test. IEEE VR 2025, XR Gallery, St. Malo, https://ieeevr.org/2025/awards/conference-awards/
  • "Best Paper Award - Honourable Mention" (2021) for Harth, Jonathan; Hofmann, Alexandra (2021): Mixed Reality Methods. Preliminary Considerations for Multimodal Analysis of Human-Agent Interactions. CUI@IUI 2021
  • "Peter Bartholmes Teaching Award" (2018) for lecturers at Witten/Herdecke University with above-average commitment in the amount of € 2,000 for the seminars "Ethnographic Explorations of Virtual Worlds" and "Habitus Transformation and Educational Processes".

 

Memberships: