- Stockholm University, Social Anthropology, Department Memberadd
- Anthropology of Technology, Infrastructure, Materiality (Anthropology), Media Anthropology, Digital Anthropologies, Anthropology of Policy, and 20 moreGlobal governmentality, Anthropology of Mobility, Anthropology of Eastern Europe, Post-Socialism, Ethnographic Methods, Europeanization, Tim Ingold, Ethnography, Sweden, Social Anthropology, STS (Anthropology), Big Data, Political Ecology (Anthropology), Digital Media, Anthropology, Design Anthropology, Anthropology of the State, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Science and Technology Studies, and Michael Burawoyedit
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"Die Grenzen Europas sind seit einigen Jahren gen Osten verschoben – Zeit für eine erste Bilanz des Alltags im »neuen Europa«. Wie wurde der homo sovieticus zum erfolgreichen Europäer? Was bedeuten heute Gleichheit und Differenz,... more
"Die Grenzen Europas sind seit einigen Jahren gen Osten verschoben – Zeit für eine erste Bilanz des Alltags im »neuen Europa«. Wie wurde der homo sovieticus zum erfolgreichen Europäer? Was bedeuten heute Gleichheit und Differenz, Gemeinschaft und Individualität in den osteuropäischen Gesellschaften?
Diese Studie untersucht die Logiken sozialer Differenzierung, die im Kontext der postsozialistischen Transformation und europäischen Integration auftreten. Konsumstrategien, Lebensstile und Körpertechniken werden als Ausdrucksformen veränderter Vorstellungen von Erfolg und gutem Leben analysiert. Es entsteht eine eindrucksvolle Ethnographie des neuen osteuropäischen Alltags.
Asta Vonderau (Dr. phil.) lehrt und forscht am Institut für Europäische Ethnologie der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Schwerpunkte ihrer Arbeit sind die postsozialistische Transformation und Europäisierungsprozesse in (Ost-)Europa, kulturelle Logiken der Ökonomie und des Marktes und die Mobilitäts-, Migrations- sowie Elitenforschung.
WWW: www2.hu-berlin.de/ethno/"
Diese Studie untersucht die Logiken sozialer Differenzierung, die im Kontext der postsozialistischen Transformation und europäischen Integration auftreten. Konsumstrategien, Lebensstile und Körpertechniken werden als Ausdrucksformen veränderter Vorstellungen von Erfolg und gutem Leben analysiert. Es entsteht eine eindrucksvolle Ethnographie des neuen osteuropäischen Alltags.
Asta Vonderau (Dr. phil.) lehrt und forscht am Institut für Europäische Ethnologie der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Schwerpunkte ihrer Arbeit sind die postsozialistische Transformation und Europäisierungsprozesse in (Ost-)Europa, kulturelle Logiken der Ökonomie und des Marktes und die Mobilitäts-, Migrations- sowie Elitenforschung.
WWW: www2.hu-berlin.de/ethno/"
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Growing the Cloud: Investigating Mega Projects of the Digital Future in Sweden This paper is situated in the field of anthropological studies of technologies and infrastructures. It focuses on methodological challenges which... more
Growing the Cloud: Investigating Mega Projects of the Digital Future in Sweden This paper is situated in the field of anthropological studies of technologies and infrastructures. It focuses on methodological challenges which anthropologists encounter while studying large-scale technological projects. In investigating the social effects of the data centre industry in northern Sweden, the paper describes the global Cloud’s local embededdness, and the local/ global relations which emerge in the course of this new industry’s implementation. It denaturalises imaginaries of scale, and analyses how scales are made and unmade in everyday practices, performed by different actors. The study contributes to our understanding of cross-border technological processes, by regarding scaling as political and governmental practice. Key words: mega projects, data centres, scaling, Sweden, anthropology of infrastructure.
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Collaborations and contestations have always been present in collaborative research, and many case studies illustrate related conundrums. Yet, we argue that the concrete challenges emerging within dynamics of collaborations and... more
Collaborations and contestations have always been present in collaborative research, and many case studies illustrate related conundrums. Yet, we argue that the concrete challenges emerging within dynamics of collaborations and contestations deserve much more focused attention, especially in contexts of publicly engaged anthropological work. This essay introduces a special issue of seven highly diverse contributions that are all animated by, and oriented towards, this common concern. Against the backdrop of situating this problematique within broader developments in increasingly diverse anthropologies of recent decades, we discuss the different contributions in light of their specific insights regarding collaborations and contestations. Based on these fine-grained case studies, we draw four transversal conclusions that we see as relevant also for publicly engaged anthropologies beyond the individual contributions that are assembled here.
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Drawing upon ethnographic data, this article investigates the effects of a new online campus management system in one of the largest universities in Germany. It shows the various ways in which this technological innovation influenced... more
Drawing upon ethnographic data, this article investigates the effects of a new online campus management system in one of the largest universities in Germany. It shows the various ways in which this technological innovation influenced students', teachers' and administrative personnel's relations and everyday working practices and how it is influential in the reorganisation of university structures. The online management system is regarded as an important part of an emerging infrastructure of excellence, which materialises the changing understanding of qualitative studies and teaching. Findings show that the online management supports standardised and economised study, teaching and administrative practices and silences creativity and flexibility. However, these standardisations are negotiated and questioned by the actors involved.
Research Interests: Business, Sociology, Anthropology, Creativity, Ethnography, and 13 moreLearning and Teaching, Social and Cultural Anthropology, Public Relations, Bologna Process, New Public Management and Governance, Germany, Infrastructure, University, High School, Audit, Excellence, Flexibility in engineering design, and Curriculum and Pedagogy
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This article examines the downside of digitization processes industrial and infrastructural locations that facilitate virtual connectivity and collectivities. Based on the case of Facebook's data c ...
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Based on a case study that follows the introduction process of cash registers in Lithuanian open air markets, this paper investigates the local forms and effects of European policies of transparency and standardization. Building on... more
Based on a case study that follows the introduction process of cash registers in Lithuanian open air markets, this paper investigates the local forms and effects of European policies of transparency and standardization. Building on anthropological research on transparency, standardization and policies, the introduction of cash registers is studied as an implementation of European governmentality leading to new forms of personhood and social exclusion. The paper shows how Europeanization is negotiated in the specific context of open-air markets that traditionally are perceived as being unruly spaces. It highlights the gap between the apparently transparent and clear vision of Europeanization through standardization and its daily messiness and disorder.
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ABSTRACT
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When a world-leading IT company expressed the intention to locate its infrastructure in the Swedish city of Luleå in 2011, the announcement immediately triggered future scenarios and visions of a new industrial era, economic prosperity,... more
When a world-leading IT company expressed the intention to locate its infrastructure in the Swedish city of Luleå in 2011, the announcement immediately triggered future scenarios and visions of a new industrial era, economic prosperity, and changing urban life. Such anticipa- tions were supported and shaped by municipal planning and business management activities soon materializing in the form of building sites, regional development strategies, and new markets. Since the actual name and operations of the IT company were kept entirely secret, the planning and implementation of “Project Gold”—as the data centre project was called locally—was as much driven by collective imaginaries as by hard facts or former experiences. is paper is based on an ethnographic study that followed the implementation of Facebook’s rst European data centre in Luleå. It analyzes di erent modes of data centre infrastructural (in)visibility and shows how imaginaries became in uential both for implementing the cloud in Luleå and for shaping the anticipated time and space of “post-extractive modernity.” More speci cally, the paper focuses on the socio-technical preconditions as well as the concrete prac- tices and styles—that is, technologies of imagination—that enable those imaginaries.
The current migration of global cloud infrastructure towards the Northern hemisphere has social and environmental effects and triggers hopes and expectations. While IT infrastructure providers expect to reduce energy costs by using cold... more
The current migration of global cloud infrastructure towards the Northern hemisphere has social and environmental effects and triggers hopes and expectations. While IT infrastructure providers expect to reduce energy costs by using cold nordic air for server cooling, the geographically remote (and demographically often weak) regions expect to attract investitions and to identify new pathways to regional development. My paper is based on an ethnographic study which investigated social and environmental effects of cloud infrastructure and data center industry in Northern Sweden. The paper focuses on air as a vibrant infrastructural matter. It investigates how IT experts as well as state and regional institutions in Sweden collaborate in forming local air into a new regional product – Nordic Climate – that matches the cloud’s infrastructural needs and can be sold to the data center industry. Highlighting aspects of matter, temporality and infrastructural violence, I demonstrate how the cloud in this particular local context unfolds through flows of air among human and non-human actors that respond to each other.
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Popular representations imagine the internet as being immaterial and fluid; hidden from the public eye are the industry and complex infrastructure securing the functionality of the World Wide Web, as well as this industry’s social and... more
Popular representations imagine the internet as being immaterial and fluid; hidden from the public eye are the industry and complex infrastructure securing the functionality of the World Wide Web, as well as this industry’s social and environmental effects. Focussing on the implementation of a Facebook data centre in the Swedish city of Luleå, this article investigates how the global cloud is localised within a specific historical and social context. It shows how this new industrial development becomes a part of state-making and regional identity-building processes by triggering the re-scaling of territories and shaping new geographies in relation to expanding cloud infrastructures. Tracing those infrastructure-making processes reveals some of the key dynamics between the Swedish state, its regions and the global IT economy.
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Oft wird das Internet, gerade auch in der Eigenwerbung der IT-Branche, als fließend, offen und immateriell dargestellt. Online-Netzwerke und-Dienste wie Facebook oder Twitter sollen virtuell, egalitär, demokratisch und sogar... more
Oft wird das Internet, gerade auch in der Eigenwerbung der IT-Branche, als fließend, offen und immateriell dargestellt. Online-Netzwerke und-Dienste wie Facebook oder Twitter sollen virtuell, egalitär, demokratisch und sogar umweltfreund-lich erscheinen. Dass sie auf einer komplexen Infrastruktur beruhen, bleibt dabei meist unberücksichtigt. Dabei wachsen IT-Infrastrukturen und Industrien in unerhörtem Tempo und haben weitreichende ökologische und soziale Folgen, die öf-fentlich diskutiert werden müssen. Wenn wir als kritische BürgerInnen an der Gestaltung der digitalen Informationsgesell-schaft aktiv teilhaben wollen, so die These dieses Beitrags, dürfen wir uns nicht mit der bloßen Betrachtung und Bewer-tung der Inhalte des Internets zufriedengeben.
Drawing upon ethnographic data, this article investigates the effects of a new online campus management system in one of the largest universities in Germany. It shows the various ways in which this technological innovation influenced... more
Drawing upon ethnographic data, this article investigates the effects of a new online campus management system in one of the largest universities in Germany. It shows the various ways in which this technological innovation influenced students', teachers' and administrative personnel's relations and everyday working practices and how it is influential in the reorganisation of university structures. The online management system is regarded as an important part of an emerging infrastructure of excellence, which materialises the changing understanding of qualitative studies and teaching. Findings show that the online management supports standardised and economised study, teaching and administrative practices and silences creativity and flexibility. However, these standardisations are negotiated and questioned by the actors involved.
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Based on a case study that follows the introduction process of cash registers in Lithuanian open air markets, this paper investigates the local forms and effects of European policies of transparency and standardization. Building on... more
Based on a case study that follows the introduction process of cash registers in Lithuanian open air markets, this paper investigates the local forms and effects of European policies of transparency and standardization. Building on anthropological research on transparency, standardization and policies, the introduction of cash registers is studied as an implementation of Eu- ropean governmentality leading to new forms of personhood and social exclusion. The paper shows how Europeanization is negotiated in the spe- cific context of open-air markets that traditionally are perceived as being unruly spaces. It highlights the gap between the apparently transparent and clear vision of Europeanization through standardization and its daily mes- siness and disorder.
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Changing Economies and Changing Identities in Postsocialist Eastern Europe The essays in this volume deal with current economic changes and their impact on identity in the postsocialist countries of Eastern Europe. The authors presented... more
Changing Economies and Changing Identities in Postsocialist Eastern Europe The essays in this volume deal with current economic changes and their impact on identity in the postsocialist countries of Eastern Europe. The authors presented in this volume have all done ...