Stadtlabor

19/10/2025

We are delighted to announce our programme for this year's winter series 2025-2026.

CRIPPING ETHNOGRAPHIC METHODS: EXPLORING ANTI-ABLEIST POTENTIALS OF MULTIMODAL ANTHROPOLOGY

- ENABLING ETHNOGRAPHY: Crafting Anti-Ableist Fieldwork Methods by Erin Durban. 20th October 2025. 4pm-6pm.

- TOWARDS A QUIET ETHNOGRAPHY: deafness and methodology by Julia Sauma. 1st December 2025. 4pm-6pm.

- ABCs OF CITIZEN SOCIAL SCIENCE AS SELF-ADVOCACY FOR LESS-LISTENED-TO PEOPLE by Kelly Fagan Robinson, 5th January 2026. 4pm-6pm.

- PATCHWORK ETHNOGRAPHY: a Methodological Guide by Chika Watanabe. 2nd February 2026. 4pm-6pm.

All events will take place at the Institute for European Ethnology (IfEE).
Anton-Wilhelm-Amo-Str. 40-41,
10117 Berlin
Room 408 from 4pm-6pm.

31/10/2024

We are delighted to announce our programme for the upcoming Winter Semester "Activating Waves: Vibrations between Art and Anthropology“.

Our first event is next Monday 4th November 2024 at 4pm at rooms 409 and 408 at the IfEE:

HEATED CONVERSATIONS by Amor Schumacher and Summer Banks

It’s November, the summer sun has faded to a distant memory and everyone’s putting on an extra sweater. Just enough distance for us to reflect on the high temperatures of August. Two researchers from an unknown organization conduct a qualitative data gathering session to fill in the gaps in the depiction of heatwaves in 2024. Participants become experts of heat, tasked with mining each other’s lived experiences. Let’s get personal in some Heated Conversations!

COME BY! We are looking forward to meeting you!

For more and updated information, please follow the link: https://wavematters.eu/activating-waves-vibrations-between-art-and-anthropology/

19/09/2024

We are very excited about the newly available experiment in multimodal and intermedial research and publishing, Epistemic attunements: Regenerating anthropology's form. It is a special pathbreaking collaboration between the Curatorium Collective and the Australian Journal of Anthropology, and the full output of this publication can be found here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/17576547/2024/35/1-2 and here: https://www.curatorium.au/

Critical, creative and collective attunements. A special issue of The Australian Journal of Anthropology.

26/06/2024

An cool experiment in multimodal urban research from the archives!

Anthropology has never been monomodal, although it may seem that the recent explosion of interest in multimodal, more-than-textual research would suggest otherwise. So we are always on the lookout for multimodal examples from our discipline’s past. In this post we highlight the recent discove

19/06/2024

We are pleased to share a report on a fun experiment we conducted late last fall. The tools to replicate are in the report!

What are the possibilities that open up when different modalities of research practice are employed in collaboration with others, with the goal of attuning ourselves to intersensorial phenomena that may exceed any single ethnographer’s ability to grasp? What kinds of values can we create when

05/06/2024

I am so happy (and proud!) to see this special issue on Elemental Urbanism coming out in our excellent and inspiring journal Berliner Blätter.

It features the work of a group of MA students at the Institut für Europäische Ethnologie - HU Berlin, whom I had the opportunity of supporting, as well as MA students from the Geography Department at HU Berlin supervised by my fantastic co-editor Laura Kram. It also includes a wonderful artistic essay on puddlology by my partner Mirja Busch and star appearances of my dear colleague Sandra Jasper, as well as Elisabeth Luggauer and Jorge Martín Sainz Terreros from our ERC project Wavematters.

Here is the ToC - all open access - enjoy the read!

Introduction

Elemental Urbanism. Engaging the terrestrial in city making Ignacio Farías, Laura Kemmer

Section 1: WATER

Re-Urbanisierung von Wasser. Wissensproduktion auf dem Testfilter des Flussbades Berlin - Tülin Fidan

Über die Möglichkeit einer Pfützologie - Mirja Busch

Hybridity in the City. Conflicts about water, space, and the reactive embedding of a rainwater retention basin in Berlin-Kreuzberg - Lucas Beseler, Antonia Bloch, Akira Schroth

Elemental Solidarity. SF stories from the Floating University, Berlin - Sarah Coordes, Nina Schäfer, Merle Quade

Die Braune Spree. Zwischen blühenden Landschaften und feral dynamics der Lausitzer Bergbaufolgelandschaften - Kristiane Fehrs

Section 2: EARTH

Fürsorge aus der Ferne. Der Mittlere Sonnentau in Berliner Moorrenaturierungsverfahren - Sarah Felix

Urbanizing Soil. Berlin Teufelsberg as leaky archive - Laura Kemmer, Sandra Jasper.

Soil-Care and Soil-Awareness. Two different takes on Berliner’s relation to Soil? - Mathilde Kærgaard-Skaaning, Husseim Stuck, Judith Oesch.

Caring for Compost - Lara-Helene Deppermann, Josefa Vergara.

Gardening in Public Spaces. From Comfort to Care - Ignacio Farías, Kristiane Fehrs

Section 3: AIR

Heated Atmospheres and Hot Topics. Karuna heat relief as experimental problematization? - Moritz Roemer.

Time-Travelling the Time-Travel in(to) Heat. Thoughts and speculations about thermic futures in urban spaces - Elisabeth Luggauer, Jorge Martín Sainz de los Terreros

Urbanisierung von SolarPower. Der Masterplan Solarcity Berlin zwischen premises und promises - Svenja Bär

*

If you are in Berlin, please also mark your calendars for the launch of this special issue on July 8, 6pm, as part of the Think and Drink Colloquium of the Georg Simmel Center for Urban Studies at M*hrenstr. 41, 10117 Berlin

Modern urbanism has traditionally set cities in opposition to natural elements,constructing modernist urban landscapes strictly separated from water,while ignoring and polluting the air and soil. Today, urban societies are once againhaunted by the overflows and burning presences of the elements they...

30/05/2024

For those of you in Berlin, please join us at Georg Simmel Center for Urban Studies in collaboration with our BUA project Multispecies Health

27/05/2024

10 June Event: An N of 1: Multimodal Experiments in Ethnographic Portraiture

Jenny Chio
(University of Southern California/ Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)

Abstract:

This event aims to resituate and rethink the practice of portraiture as an ethnographic method by exploring portraiture as a culturally conditioned, socially resonant form of knowledge production and social relatedness. All portraits, even self-portraits, rely upon a relationship: between the portrayed and the portrayer, the sitter and the artist, the interlocutor and the ethnographer. Nevertheless, the singularity of the portrait -- its narrow focus on individual experience and its representation – poses an inherent challenge to the conceit of ethnography as a form of writing (collective) culture. While there are numerous examples of serial portraiture as a form of sociological investigation, perhaps most famously in the work of German photographer August Sander (Menschen des 20. Jahrhunderts), there is still relatively little theorization around how individual stories are transformed into ethnographic analysis. What happens, then, when one’s dataset is comprised of just one, maybe two (e.g. John Marshall’s classic film, N!ai: Story of a !Kung Woman)? Is it possible, and in what ways, to analyze cultural processes through a portrait of an individual? How might portraiture, as a scholarly and multimodal experiment, radically re-theorize forms of social and scholarly engagement? This presentation will draw on an excerpt from my work-in-progress film, These Days, These Homes, which explores the lives and ambitions of two Miao women in contemporary rural China.

When: Monday,10 June
Time: 16:00
Where: Institute for European Ethnology, M*hrenstrasse 40/41
Room: 212

Image credit: Haejung Lee

22/04/2024

6 MAY EVENT: CROWD/METHODS

The Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology Presents:

“Crowd/Methods”

Max Jack (Max Planck Institute for Human Development)

In this first event of the SoSe 2024 program, Crowd / Methods offers a space to think through the analytic and ethnographic possibilities afforded by the fleeting lifeworlds of crowds. Defying more normative parameters of organization and subjectivity, crowds do not function as a group of distinct individuals, and yet, neither are they a fully unified collective. Moreover, crowds exist as a sensory-rich multitude reliant upon varying degrees of collective purpose and affective cohesion, which raises distinct questions about how to ethnographically study these urban congregations. Beginning with a foray into Jack’s fieldwork on hardcore football fans at FC Union Berlin, this event will explore the possibilities and tensions inherent in field methods and analytic approaches to crowd-based research. For example, because they operate upon an experiential terrain equally reliant on the sonic and the haptic dimensions of human being and action, crowds exceed their representation via writing or digital media. With this in mind, how might ethnographers engage with a patchwork of personal experience and participant perspectives in their writing to retain a viscerality of experience which is key to understanding the energy and charge of crowds? Or, shifting levels and objectives, how can we contextualise the formation of crowds and their relationship to the politics of late capitalism?

When: Monday, 6 May
Time: 16:00
Where: Institute for European Ethnology, M*hrenstrasse 40/41
Room: 212

Next Stadtlabor Events:

10 June, “An N of 1: Multimodal Experiments in Ethnographic Portraiture” with Jenny Chio (University of Southern California)

1 July “Testing the Kit for Multimodal Appreciation” with the Multimodal Appreciations Research Group

For more information contact: [email protected]

16/04/2024

https://vacatures.uva.nl/UvA/job/Open-PhD-Position-Multimodal-Experimentations-in-More-Than-Human-Anthropology/792670902/?fbclid=IwAR3cHAHcfwjyCvCMck5d-Cg6TM-uUca0V4gSL9VIOL15XipoIINwacvrsNY

Open PhD Position: Multimodal Experimentations in More-Than-Human Anthropology

13/02/2024

"Urban research by other means"

The Stadtlabor for Multimodal Anthropology invites you to a special panel featuring the research of the winners of the Multimodal Projects Fund. The event, entitled “Urban research by other means,” is part of the GSZ Tage conference organized by the Georg Simmel Center for Urban Studies. It will feature the Sonnenallee podcast, the Racoon City Berlin web platform, and the Instrumentarium of the Kontaminiert Werden project.

Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Date: Thursday, 15 February
Location: Festsaal in der Luisenstr. 56 on the Humboldt University campus.

Updates can be found at: www.gsz.hu-berlin.de

The organizers would like to know that you are coming. Let them know at: [email protected]