Katja Schwaller is a writer, translator, and urban ethnographer at Stanford University. Her work explores the interplay of digital capitalism, labor, and the built environment. She is currently working on a dissertation entitled Bubble Worlds: Urban Space and Everyday Life in Silicon Valley’s New Company Towns, in which she examines how technology companies imagine, appropriate, and (re)produce (sub)urban space in the Bay Area and beyond.
She is the editor, translator, and co-author of Technopolis - Urbane Kämpfe in der San Francisco Bay Area, a collection of essays and interviews on urban struggles and Big Tech in the Bay Area, published with Assoziation A (Berlin) and Seismo (Zurich) in 2019.
Her writing appeared in sub/urban - Zeitschrift für kritische Stadtforschung, Die Wochenzeitung WOZ, the Berliner Gazette, A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area, Counterpoints - an atlas by the the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, and a Multimedijalni institut edited collection, among others.
She is currently a PhD Candidate in the interdisciplinary Modern Thought and Literature program at Stanford University, and a Digital Public Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. Before coming to Stanford, she earned an M.A. in Urban Affairs at the University of San Francisco and a Diploma in Translation from SAL Höhere Fachschule für Sprachberufe in Zurich, Switzerland. She lives in San Francisco.
You can contact me at kschwaller at stanford dot edu