Portfolio
- a multi-month study of e-waste recycling in a smelter as an intern to theorize the value of waste;
- a document analysis of an Indian law, underpinned and guided by interviews with experts, to decode the history and embeddedness of the law;
- analyses of controversies on Twitter using timelines, hashtag correlation and networks of tweet mentions to examine social change and social order;
- exploration of the ecological footprint of social networks via the construction of a dedicated Mastodon instance with a loosely affiliated, globally distributed research group;
- …
- Laser, Stefan/Alison Stowell (2020): Apple’s recycling robot „Liam“ and the global recycling economy of e-waste. What ‘The Guardian’ does, and what he misses out on. In: Johansson, Nils/Ek, Richard (Eds.), Perspectives on waste from the social sciences and humanities: Opening the bin. Cambridge: Cambride Scholars, 265–279.
- Greeson, Emma, Stefan Laser, und Olli Pyyhtinen. 2020. “Dis/Assembling Value: Lessons from Waste Valuation Practices”. Valuation Studies 7 (2): 151–66.
- Laser, Stefan. 2020. “Sorting, Shredding and Smelting Scrap: The Production of Value by Deformation at a High-Tech Recycler of Electronic Waste” 7 (2).
- Laser, Stefan. 2016. “A Phone Worth Keeping for the Next 6 Billion? Exploring the Creation of a Modular Smartphone Made by Google”. In Müll: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf das Übrig-Gebliebene, edited by Christiane Lewe, Tim Othold, und Nicolas Oxen, 201–26. Bielefeld: transcript.
Publication formats: Maybe you need do decide what side you're on, GenAI or Zine?
As part of digital infrastructure research, we are exploring alternative forms to publish academic work. Currently and in different iterations: zines (from “magazine”). It really makes a difference to think about knowledge production in an open, playful format. Just make things.
For me, zines represent the internet culture of the 1990s and early 2000s. It’s hacky, a bit weird, but above all accessible to everyone. People use simple formats and dare to do something, especially design-wise.
Here are two examples. A zine within a zine collection that we were privileged to contribute from the RUSTlab and our data centre research project. In the “Liminal excavations” we contribute a piece on data centers, specifically: the different perspectives that gather around the infrastructure of a data center, it folks, designers, builders, scientists, you name it (they want to be named).
The second zine is part of the 2024 annual conference of the collaborative research center “Virtual Lifeworlds”. During the conference, I organized an “infrastructure wlk” with Estrid, which took us around the campus in Bochum and through various manifestations of virtuality. Three parts. We asked what the strange knowledge form of the lecture is all about (guiding us to a Hörsaal), how you can explore a data center using an AR app (servers fall from the sky and diesel generators rattle) and why a strange water stream was built in the middle of the brutalist campus (a stream which has now been shut down but still looks magnificient).
This is SO much fun, I can tell you, and it was a very material practice completing the zines. Designing, cutting, folding, glueing, sharing. Writing project proposals, books, papers and stuff is great. But we need to lighten things up, once in a while.
On another publication front, I have been very active in exploring collective writing. I’ve co-edited two speculative volumes: a situated lexicon on virtuality and a sci-fi-ish volume on writing uneasy predictions. www.virtuelle-lebenswelten.de/blog-post…
Thinking like a waste scholar
Waste is on top of my mind, although not always centre stage in every research project.
I was part of the initial steering group and now am a member of the research group waste in motion funded by the German Research Foundation. With Nicolas Schlitz I’ve co-edited a Special Issue on frictions in global recycling networks.
On a global scale, I am cooperating with the Disaster STS network and the European waste research group behind ‘Opening the Bin’. These are all wonderful people.
Waste happens to be my favourite topic for public engagement: in theatre, public discussions, keynotes, and radio shows. Always happy for invites.
Engagement
I was a board member of stsing and contact person of their tech & infrastructure working group, from 2020 until 2023.
In 2019, there was an organizing workshop in Kassel, which I co-organized with Tanja Bogusz, Stefanie Büchner, Endre Dányi, Anja Klein, Martina Schlünder and Estrid Sørensen. Julie Mewes gives a report.
stsing is now an association whose mission is to strengthen Science & Technology Studies in the German-speaking world with new creative and critical methods.
In 2023, I joined the editorial board of the EASST Review journal.
Interspecies Care
More-than-human research in the aftermath of the Corona crisis.
I have been researching public discourses on the meat industry and the culling of minks in a writing collective. The book is based on a cooperation with students. Building on an excellent seminar research report, we knitted a book together; thus the project also stands for an egalitarian (social) science that thinks across statuses.
More on human-animal studies
Beyond that, I have engaged with Cultured Meat in other animal-human research. See: Gertenbach, Lars, Jörn Lamla, und Stefan Laser. 2021. „Eating Ourselves out of Industrial Excess? Degrowth, Multi-Species Conviviality and the Micro-Politics of Cultured Meat“. Anthropological Theory 21 (3): 386–408. doi.org/10.1177/1…
Current Project
My main research theme right now is data centres: their local arrangement, material legacies, building procedures, and global production networks enabling its operation. The study is conducted in the collaborative research centre 1567 Virtual Life Worlds, in subproject A02 led by Estrid Sørensen.
So what’s the pitch of the project? As information infrastructures, data centres help shape scientific knowledge production. As consumers of raw materials and energy, they contribute to shaping natural processes. This ethnographic study combines research on the interdependence of socio-technical practices in a university data centre and scientific data practices with an ethnography of the value chain from extraction of raw materials and energy production to operation and use of the data centre. It thus answers both the theoretical and empirical question of the continuity of nature and knowledge.
More info can be found here. Check out the online lecture series we did: Across the Layers: Scientific Knowledge Production, Planetary Resources, and Data Centres.
Collaboration
In the context of the research centre, individual and collective publications are produced, and beyond that I am interested in collaborations that advance the research conceptually or empirically. Currently, I am based abroad in Vietnam and am investigating the question of what material investments are necessary for the design and construction of (sometimes extremely efficient) chips that require data centres. Southeast Asia is a good base for this work, because central nodes of value chains can be found here, and because current, including political, developments are changing the structure of value chains and revealing dependencies as well as new opportunities.
Publication
In an article for Bits & Bäume, we discuss the implications of our research for transformations towards sustainable IT.
Discussions of data centre sustainability often address technical improvements and political regulations. Innovations make data centres more energy efficient, and political guidelines help – and force – industry to prioritise environmental sustainability. Such innovations are important, but they tend to overlook implementation.
Sørensen, Estrid, and Stefan Laser. 2023. ‘Towards Artful Sustainable Integration of IT Infrastructures: A Report from the Construction of a University Data Centre’. In Shaping Digital Transformation for a Sustainable Society: Contributions from Bits & Bäume, edited by Patricia Jankowski, Anja Höfner, Marja Lena Hoffmann, Friederike Rohde, Rainer Rehak, and Johanna Johanna, 87–90. Berlin: Technische Universität Berlin. publication2023.bits-und-baeume.org/.
Train Infrastructures
Based on my (now concluded) work in the collaborative research centre in Siegen I contribute to the discussion on mobility transitions.
Abstract of the argument
Climate change and environmental issues call for an ecological transformation of production and consumption. In Germany, the transport sector is considered the “troubled child” of the transformation, because emissions in the mobility sector have not fallen in recent decades, in contrast to other sectors. But there are signs of change – the car industry has been criticised since the “diesel scandal” and, alongside electric mobility, e-fuels and cycling, the rail industry is seen as a beacon of hope. The industry emphasises its importance for climate and ecology and can thus establish a stable new reference in the public.
Hier ist the entire piece for download. All data and code is on Github.
Yet the situation is ambivalent. To better understand this dynamic, the first part of this article works through the transport transition discourse with a focus on rail transport. Extensive data from the social media platform Twitter serve as a basis. This part gives an overview of the actors involved and their positions and shows competing understandings of the transport transition as well as the multiplicity of problem ideas. From a qualitative perspective, the second part discusses two innovative projects in rail transport: the “Green Function of Movement Control”, which brings a kind of green wave to rail, and the “Digital Automatic Coupling”, which is intended to replace a coupling technology in freight transport that is more than 150 years old. However, it becomes apparent that the ecological transformation at the workplace rail is fleeting. The railways themselves are not driving any transformation, because they are instead preoccupied with issues of obsolescence – i.e. issues of ageing – i.e. with repair, maintenance, servicing as well as old technology and entrenched, slowly grown administration. This is not a problem per se, but an adequate description of the work and competences that are necessary to keep a rail network alive – and that need to be appreciated. If there is to be a change in transport by and with the railways, it will only work with less and slower traffic, also on the railways.
Network valuation studies
I am part of the research group On the path to the valuation society? funded by the German Research Foundation. With Emma Greeson and Olli Pyyhtinen, I’ve co-edited a Special Issue on ‘Dis/Assembling Value’.
We’ve been meeting for several years and are preparing a handbook on Valuation and Society (Routledge).
Ethnography
My central methodological competence: participant observation, immersion, following materials, expert knowledge and situated practices.
The qualitative, participatory lens is a research ethos for me, it involves participating in core practices of social actors, acquiring and reconstructing expert knowledge, and generally being creative with different sources of data.
Ethnography is a non-standardized research method in the social and cultural sciences, focusing on the collection of data, actors, perspectives, narratives, objects or curiosities. It is a more qualitative approach, but because of its problem-centered focus here, it also incorporates quantitative methods for exploration. Ethnographic research can be summed up with one imperative: Follow the actors.
In my research, I combine interviews and document analysis with quantitative approaches from the Digital Humanities. The processing of large datasets and networks of digital data serves to enrich the qualitative research. In general, the research is globally embedded, with a focus on Central Europe and Asia, as well as the many digital spaces in between.
Practical examples of my ethnographic research include:
Coding
More hands-on skills: From Data Science to Graph Analysis.
In addition to qualitative, ethnographic methods, I work with digital research approaches. They enrich the qualitative analysis. I specialise in the analysis and preparation of public controversies. I work mainly with Gephi, Python and R and focus on data analytics. See also GitHub.
Generally speaking, I’m interested in open science and knowledge and love to experiment with software, seemingly wasting many hours on testing and deploying setups. This is often connected with ecological matters, when, for example, it is about exploring the ecological footprint of data centres used for social media. For a collective experiment, see for example the Disaster STS collective, to which I contribute. See this report on air pollution.
Example of a Gephi graph I created:
E-Waste Dissertation Research
Global and interdisciplinary research on e-waste: ethnographic studies in Germany, India, and across social media platforms.
Key for this research is a book I published: Hightech at the end.
Hightech at the end examines the global recycling of electronic waste by studying multiple sites: ethnographic observations help unravel political negotiations on sustainability in India, the in-house value chain of a German recycling company is scrutinized, and a failed Google innovation is discussed.
The Intro: Moving away from individual consumption
Electronic waste is a unique and fascinating waste stream. It keeps popping up on the news. The mountain of waste is growing – more than 50 million tons per year, as the United Nations University estimates in its renowned “E-Waste” reports. And at the same time, consumers learn from the many reports about the strange routes that ‘their’ e-waste takes after disposal. These are usually stories in which things like old computers travel to the global south, to West Africa or Asia.
What is being conveyed is a general uncertainty. Too little is happening. Garbage is not only not avoided, but it also makes conditions and life even worse. Individual consumption makes life in the distance worse. But this argument is misleading. Critical researcher points out that such reports reproduce racism and increase inequalities.
High-tech at the end presents an alternative perspective. There is by no means little being done in dealing with electronic waste. The legal and industrial changes are just difficult to grasp. They take place on an infrastructural level that requires special attention. At the same time, the book’s core argument is that this is why the focus on individual responsibility – on households, for example – falls far short. It is industrial practices that are responsible for most waste and the most toxic waste; consumers cannot control this and do not even know about many industrial routines. “Infrastructures,” the book argues, “related production systems and their path dependencies are mainly responsible for material output, i.e. energy consumption, residues and waste. The ratios are difficult to estimate, but only between 3 and 9 per cent of e-waste is household waste, and even this waste is highly mediated. The exact calculation of this is not of central importance here, this is a controversy in itself, as the academic blog “Discard Studies” shows in detail.
High-tech in the end develops the argument that an infrastructure of high-tech recycling has been established over the last three decades. You have to look at this infrastructure if you want to understand how waste is handled. By examining the everyday work on and with the high-tech infrastructure, taking into account its history, one gains a new view of social structures and dynamics.
Towards a new e-waste policy
High-tech at the end discusses a variety of approaches to address the issues, including a critical look at the current European recycling industry. It should be viewed critically because it discusses waste in a rather one-sided way, usually in a negative way, i.e. as a hazard. Repair in particular offers potential here, while it is not held in very high esteem, especially when compared with the significant funding initiatives that shredder and smelting companies receive.
In the fourth part of the book, political questions are played through, and the focus is on political consequences and new democratic impulses. It is a plea for a new examination of very selected questions:
How can the recycling industry really put industrial responsibility at the centre? There is a great deal of creativity and political urge in dealing with household waste. How can the reach be increased to tackle waste prevention aggressively? How can knowledge about the quantities and distribution of different types of electronic waste be improved? (Because estimates such as the ratio of household and industrial waste are currently only rough estimates, which emphasizes the problem). How can the reparability of electronic equipment be promoted? For example, how far does the announced EU law on the “right to repair” go? How can the causes of obsolescence be better researched, beyond stereotypes? How can local initiatives be fostered to empower users? How can global solidarity be built, and how can initiatives learn from each other? How can a project like the Fairphone become more than a “proof of concept”? How does the political responsibility of the big producers come into focus? What kind of waste should be produced? Which dirty materials are acceptable, how many, where? How can such questions be approached democratically? Do proactive regulations of other industries offer good examples?
More on this dissertation
You can read more about this dissertation on the website of the book. I’ve published various articles on the topic: