Katja Schwaller is a writer, translator, and urban ethnographer at Stanford University. She writes about cities, landscapes, practices, and the pitfalls of digital capitalism. Her dissertation, Silicon Valley Landscapes - Architecture and the Soft Power of Big Tech, explores the local footprint of Silicon Valley companies. By strolling and biking around the blurry edges of their corporate headquarters, she shows how Big Tech becomes persuasive through the built environment, even if the liberal facade is crumbling. Weaving together ethnographic interviews, photography, and archival research, Silicon Valley Landscapes provides an affective, everyday account from the frontline of techno-capitalism.
She is the editor, translator, and co-author of Technopolis - Urbane Kämpfe in der San Francisco Bay Area, an edited volume on Big Tech and urban struggles 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, Organization, A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area, Counterpoints, and a Multimedijalni Institut edited collection, among others.
She holds a PhD from the interdisciplinary Modern Thought and Literature program at Stanford University, and was recently awarded a Public Knowledge Fellowship at Stanford Public Humanities. 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 and Berlin.
You can contact me at kschwaller at stanford dot edu, I’d be happy to send you a PDF of any work you might be interested in.