Winter 2023-2024 Event Series
The Stadtlabor is pleased to announce its event series for the Winter Semester 2023/2024!
News
Sounding Berlin: Towards an Apparatus for Atmospheric Attunements
The Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology invites you to its first event of the Winter Semester 2023/24.
An Hommage at the Institute of European Ethnology
Missing Latour
I never met Latour and, yet here I am, paying a tribute to his work, trying to express the meaning of his premature death, to map the scope of the loss. I missed to meet him when he was alive, and I miss him now, concerned as I am about how to think the contemporary.
Project / On going
Video Release: Sensing and making sense of cities as wave fields: A multimodal guided bus tour through “hot spots” in Madrid
A little bit more than a year ago, on the 8th of July 2022, more than 50 STS-scholars attending the European Association of Science and Technology Studies (EASST) conference in Madrid participated in a three-hour “thermodynamic” bus ride organised by the WAVEMATTERS-team. On this bus ride, Jos Temprano and Victor Rovira, a local team of a filmmaker and a soundrecordist, joined us and together we produced this video of the ride through heat.
Waves at an Interface: Moving Towards a WAVEMATTERS Website
Weïv Mæt-ers visits Katja Gretzinger’s studio to begin the design of its website and to grapple with the challenge of drawing waves together at an interface.
MULTIMODAL RESEARCH DEVICES
The Stadtlabor invites to the third and last event in the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology’s Event Series for the Summer Semester 2023:
Illustrating Research
The Stadtlabor invites to the second event in the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology’s Event Series for the Summer Semester 2023:
Modelling Controversies #3: Geschichten vom Zaudern
Die dritte Veranstaltung der Reihe Modelling Controversies findet im Kielraum am Rathausblock Kreuzberg statt.
Graphic Research Working Group: Call for Participation
Are you interested in how research can incorporate drawing, comic art, illustrated narrative and other graphic forms? Then join our working group, which will focus on drawing and the construction of graphic or illustrated narratives from fieldnotes and research encounters. Click through for more information.
Fieldwork: In search of 5G waves in Brussels
The “Urban Vibrations” research team has now set out for fieldwork in Europe and the USA. Here, we share some insights from Brussels, where EU policy makers promote 5G innovation while citizens demonstrate against ‘smart communities’.
Multimodal Anthropology
Summer 2023 Event Series
The Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology invites to three public events during the Summer Semester 2023.
Open-source cooperative game
Waste What?
WASTE WHAT? is an open-source cooperative game, which explores how we can think about materials differently, trying out many ways to keep stuff in use. In the game you play as a material recovery initiative. Your goal is to creatively find new uses for discarded things, closing loops and reducing the amount of waste that is burned.
Film Screening and Discussion
Homage: In Conversation with Latour
A Film Screening and Discussion with invited guests on the legacy of Latour. This is a joint event by the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology and the Anthropology of Environment | Human Relations laboratory at the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, HU-Berlin.
Kaleidoscopic collaborations: experimental methods and academic trajectories
A conversation with Jorge Núñez and Maka Suarez of Kaleidos: Center of Interdisciplinary Ethnography (Ecuador)
VW Open Up Grant 2023-2024
Multimodal Appreciation: Prototypes for the Evaluation and Institutionalisation of More-than-Textual Ethnography
In this project we take an experimental approach to a stubborn problem: How to evaluate and institutionalize more-than-textual research that is often impossible to classify and at odds with traditional modes of disciplinary knowledge production?
Journal Article
Multimodal Values: The Challenge of Institutionalizing and Evaluating More- than-textual Ethnography
In this collective text, we introduce the vision and work of the Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology at the Humboldt-University of Berlin and propose to explore the values of multimodal ethnographic projects, broadly construed.
ERC Grant 2022-26
Urban Vibrations: How Physical Waves come to matter in Contemporary Urbanism
In this project, we explore a mostly overlooked type of environmental issue, airborne waves, and explore how solar heat, environmental noise and electromagnetic fields ‘come to matter’ in contemporary urbanism.
EASST2022 in Madrid
Cities as wave fields: A multimodal guided bus tour through “hot spots” in Madrid
The WAVEMATTERS project convened the special format Sensing and making sense of cities as wave fields: A multimodal guided bus tour through “hot spots” in Madrid at the EASST2022 conference “The Politics of Technoscientific Futures”.
IfEE Institutskolloquium SoSe22
Ageing Cities
On July 19th 2022, 14:30-16:00, the main results of the Studienprojekt’s ‘Ageing Cities’, coordinated by Tomás Criado, were presented in the IfEE’s Institutskolloquium (SoSe22). The presentation was delivered by the group of students who partook in the project: Maximilian Apel, Erman Dinc, Christine Maicher, Adam Petras, Doreen Sauer, and Anna Maria Schlotmann.
EASST2022 in Madrid
Conference Panel: Doing Airborne Exposure
In our team’s first jointly organised conference panel in Madrid in early July we explored, with colleagues from all over Europe, Canada and Chile, how devices, knowledges and practices for feeling, sensing, making sense of and regulating potential harm borne from the air.
The values of multimodal projects: A video documentation
Now available: Video-summary of the two online events part of “The values of multimodal projects” workshop.
Multimodal Project Fund
Sonnenallee Podcast
The ‘Sonnenallee Podcast’ project discusses urban negotiations of space and time in open-ended conversation formats with guest speakers: what affects condition the notion of public space in Sonnenallee?
Student fund
Multimodal Projects Fund
A semester-based call inviting HU students at all levels – BA, MA and PhD – to apply for funding for multimodal projects addressing urban spaces, transformations and/or other matters.
Zauderbude eröffnet!
Image: Ⓒ Rebecca Wall / Felix Marlow
Eröffnung der mobilen Forschungswerkstatt zur kooperativen Stadtentwicklung beim KO-Markt des Haus der Statistik am 14. Mai 2022
Inspirador for Possible Cities | Labetek Apung
Image: Foto (Detail): © Labtek Apung
Der Inspirador for Possible Cities ist ein Projekt mit dem Ziel, nachhaltige Städte neu zu denken, indem es inspirierende Beispiele aus mehr als 32 Orten auf der gesamten Welt identifizierte und präsentierte.
Experimental Collaborations: Ethnography through fieldwork devices (edited book)
In the accounts compiled in this book, ethnography occurs through processes of material and social interventions that turn the field into a site for epistemic collaboration.
Project / On going
Urban Development via Public-Civic Partnerships. Forms of Cooperation, Controversies and Modelling Attempts
In these cooperations, the involvement of civil society actors in decision-making processes and design processes goes beyond legally prescribed levels of participation.
SFB: Re-Figuration of Spaces - 2022-25
The Urban Microclimate Regime: The Constitution of Spaces and Infrastructures of Heat
Image: Stuttgart tramway tracks. Author: City of Stuttgart, Office for Environmental Protection
The project investigates the reconfiguration of urban spaces associated with microclimatic adaptation strategies.
The Routledge Companion to Actor-Network Theory
This companion explores ANT as an intellectual practice, tracking its movements and engagements with a wide range of other academic and activist projects.
Anthropology beyond text? Experiments, devices and platforms of multimodal ethnographic practice
Workshop, November 25-27, 2021
More than 30 anthropologists from DACH institutions met over two days to discuss the anthropological promises as well as challenges of different multimodal formats.
Ageing Cities: The crisis of Welfare infrastructures
In this Studienprojekt, we would like to learn to practice ethnography paying attention to the specific urban dimensions of ageing and ageing in cities.
Towards a multimodal urban anthropology (DGSKA 2021, workshop)
More-than-human approaches in urban anthropology have convincingly contributed to rethinking the plurality of modes of knowledge, the assemblages and the kinds of actors that constitute our cities. But what do these conceptual interventions do to our ethnographic modes of inquiry?
Online Lecture “Urban Vibrations: How physical waves come to matter in contemporary urbanism”
The talk focused on the environmental issue of airbone waves, and explore how solar heat and environmental noise ‘come to matter’ in contemporary urbanism.
House of Gossip
Image by Vasylysa Shchogoleva
House of Gossip is an open-source downloadable game that stages and creates the grounds for reflection on conflicts regarding housing and the different viewpoints in a volatile real estate market.
4- 6 players /// Age ~10 – ∞ /// ca. 60 min.
Playing with method: Game design as ethnographic research
What if in the face of very serious topics we developed conceptual, speculative and material tools, such as games, to find ways of intervening as ethnographers, social scientists or as activists in current design dynamics?
Project / Finished
Trash Games: Playing with the Circular Economy Transition at the Haus der Materialisierung
Funded by the Berlin University Alliance (2021-2022) call for Experimental Science Communication Laboratories
Joint project of the Chair of Circular Economy and Recycling Technologies (CERT, TU Berlin) and the Stadtlabor to develop and explore games and game design as formats of public engagement with the Circular Economy (CE).
Project / On going
Planning Miseducation: Re-Learning Urban Design Inside, Outside and Against the University
Image Credit: Arquitectura Expandida / Ana López Ortego, Candela Morado, Camilo Pinto (AKA Casi Nadie)
“I discovered an interesting thing: it turns out that an intervention, which seems as simple as writing, taking notes, or preparing a report, can change the world.“ – Alvaryan Maulana
Spiele als Stadtforschung / Games as urban research
Our Stadtlabor for multimodal anthropology‘s explorations around urban games feature at the exhibition „Open Form neu Denken“ organized by Z/KU at the Werkstatt of Haus der Statistik.
the world/s at the ends of the city: explorations in urban and environmental anthropology
What if the city was not a world in itself, but an interface to multiple, overlapping, often invisible and conflicting worldings?
Anthropos und das Ende der Welt
Wie wird die Figur des ‚Anthropos‘ in Zeiten des Anthropozäns problematisiert, hybridisiert und dezentriert, und welche Konsequenzen hat dies für die Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie?
Re-learning Design: Pedagogical Experiments with STS in Design Studio Courses
On the one hand, contemporary strands of social and cultural theory – especially in the field of science and technology studies (STS), but also in anthropology – have made design much more than a mere research object. On the other hand, design disciplines have incorporated not only social research methods and ethnography, but also the
TOGT’s Hackathon
Hackathon for the production of three ethnographic games, as part of the MA in ethnography (HU Berlin)’s Studienprojekt “The only game in town? Anthropology and the housing and real estate markets in Berlin”
Urban Cosmopolitics: Agencements, Assemblies, Atmospheres
A cosmopolitical approach to the city focuses on the multiple assemblages of human and nonhuman actors that constitute urban common worlds, and on the conflicts and compromises that arise among different ways of assembling the city.
Technical Democracy as a Challenge for Urban Studies (Co-Ed. Anders Blok)
We engage in particular its provocative diagnosis of the current situation: power no longer resides in the modern institutions of representative democracy and the market economy; instead, power has become a matter of logistics, infrastructures and expertise. This diagnosis, we suggest, brings into view the challenge of technical democracy, that is, the democratization of techno-scientific
Studio Studies. Operations, Topologies & Displacements
Studio Studies is an agenda setting volume that presents a set of empirical case studies that explore and examine the studio as a key setting for aesthetic and material production.
Cosmopolíticas
Special Issue edited with by Ignacio Farías, Israel Rodríguez und David Rojas Journal of political theory Pléyade, Number 14, December 2014
Urban assemblages. How actor-network theory changes urban studies
This book takes it as a given that the city is made of multiple partially localized assemblages built of heterogeneous networks, spaces, and practices.