Katja Schwaller (Modern Thought & Literature) | Big Tech & the City: Space, Labor, and Urban Struggles (Institute for European Ethnology , HU Berlin)

As a recipient of a 2024 GRIP award, I spent ten weeks as a Visiting Doctoral Fellow at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University in Berlin. As an affiliate with the research cluster “Culture, Society and the Digital,” I worked with Professor Manuela Bojadžijev and her wonderful team of doctoral and postdoctoral researchers studying platform labor and the materialities of the Internet from an anthropological perspective. As a Visiting Fellow, I had the opportunity to attend weekly colloquia with various research presentations and guest speakers, and present my dissertation work in a public workshop in the Spring lecture series “In the Clouds? Situating the Digital.” 

Co-organized with Valentin Niebler, the workshop, entitled “Big Tech & the City: Space, Labor, and (Sub)Urban Struggles,” brought together scholars and artists working on the intersections of urban space and digital technologies. After Valentin’s introduction, I gave a 40-minute research talk on how technology companies imagine, appropriate, and transform (sub)urban worlds around their world HQs in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and how these visions are contested on the ground. The presentation was followed by a response by Niloufar Vadiati from the HafenCity University in Hamburg, and a highly stimulating Q&A. Later, we heard inputs from curator and writer Jochen Becker, who presented on the digital story-telling project “City as Byte” by the research collective Metrozones, followed by a presentation by Humboldt researchers Gloria Albrecht and Carl Nolde on labor and environmental struggles around the new Tesla factory in the Berlin environs in Brandenburg. 

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[At Humboldt University in Berlin-Mitte] 

The aim of the workshop was to bring together insights on the local presence of Silicon Valley companies from a variety of geographical and disciplinary contexts and to advance our understanding of how these developments and struggles are interconnected. We had a large and very engaged audience, and the workshop greatly profited from Valentin’s excellent hosting and his own expertise on labor organizing in the tech industry in both Berlin and the US. The discussions continued at the ensuing reception, over a dinner with all workshop participants, and long into the night.

[Spring Colloquia Series poster with our workshop on Big Tech & the City] 

Another highlight of my time at Humboldt were the collaborative research trips to places of interest for my research. This included an excursion to the Tesla factory in Brandenburg, organized by Friedmann Wiese, a researcher working on local labor and environmental struggles, and a research trip to Hamburg, where the scholar Maja-Lee Voigt gave me an interesting city tour on the local presence of tech companies and the urban struggles unfolding around it. 

[Collaborative research at the Tesla factory in Brandenburg] 
 

I also had the chance to connect with researchers from across Humboldt University as well as from Freie Universität Berlin, Leuphana University, HafenCity University Hamburg, and the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space. In addition, I got to engage with members from the Berlin Tech Workers Coalition, the urban research collective Metrozones, and the publishing house Assoziation A, with whom I published an edited collection in 2019. I attended many relevant talks, events, and film screenings, and devoted time to writing a research article while in Berlin. A supportive network of other dissertation writers who met weekly for co-writing sessions in a local library, as well as a 10-day writing retreat with my friend and fellow researcher Laura Flierl made this an especially rewarding experience. 

[Google in Hamburg] 

This wonderful and fruitful academic exchange over the summer also led to an invitation as a keynote speaker at the upcoming conference “Urban Speculations: Cities, Technologies, Futures” at Leuphana University in February 2025. I already look forward to being back in Berlin and would like to thank everyone who made this summer such a rewarding and special time. In particular, I’d like to thank The Europe Center and the Stanford Club of Germany for funding this research stay, and Manuela Bojadžijev and everyone at the Culture, Society and the Digital research cluster for hosting me and for sharing their interesting work. Special thanks goes to Valentin Niebler, who provided invaluable logistical and intellectual support during all stages of this visit.