Carstensen, Tanja | Germany

Tanja Carstensen is a post-doctoral researcher at the research group Work-Gender-Technology at the Hamburg University of Technology, Germany. She studied sociology in Marburg and Hamburg and received her doctoral degree at the University of Hamburg, studying the social construction of the Internet in political discourses. At the Hamburg University of Technology, she worked on studies on the uses of Internet technologies and empowerment in feminist projects as well as on the potential of the Internet for the social participation of unemployed people. She recently finished the project “Web-based Work” in the co-operation project “Subject Constructions and Digital Culture” (funded by Volkswagen Foundation and Austrian Science Fund), focusing on (new) practices in Internet-based jobs. Her current research focuses on gender issues in technology, gender, intersectionality and social inequality on the Internet, transformations of work and technology, Web-based work, and interactions between humans and the Internet.

Project at IAS-STS: Digital Technologies and the Transformation of Work from Intersectional Perspectives

Work has changed fundamentally within the last decades; these transformations are currently characterized by keywords like delimitation, subjectivation and precarization. Consequences for individuals are increasing autonomy on the one side, uncertainty on the other side, and higher requirements for self-responsibility, self-management and self-marketing. But not only paid work has changed; also child care, domestic work or work as customers are concerned with demands to act efficiently, self-controlled, informed, and self-organized. At the same time the Internet has been established as a natural everyday life artefact, requiring similar actions, such as information and communication management, public self-presentation, networking, etc.

My research project follows the question of the relevance of the Internet in the transformation of work (taking a broad definition of work as a basis) and focuses on individual’s agency. How do working individuals perceive the Internet and its requirements? Does the Internet ease their work efforts, does it enable them to cope with delimitation, subjectivation and precarization, or does it restrict their agency? And how do categories of social inequality impact the individual’s agency? I follow these questions on the basis of current sociological diagnoses of work, technology, media and the Internet, as well as on my own empirical studies on the uses of the Internet in different fields of work.

Selected Publications

Carstensen, Tanja (2012): Struggling for Feminist Design. The Role of Users in Producing and Constructing Web 2.0 Media, in: Zobl, Elke/Drüeke, Ricarda (eds.): Feminist Media: Participatory Spaces, Networks and Cultural Citizenship, Bielefeld: transcript, 170-180.

Carstensen, Tanja (2012): Gendered Web 2.0: Geschlechterverhältnisse und Feminismus in Zeiten von Wikis, Weblogs und Sozialen Netzwerken, in: MedienJournal, vol. 36, no. 2, Neue Kommunikationstechnologien und Gender, 22-34.

Carstensen, Tanja (2012): Die Technologien des 'Arbeitskraftunternehmers'. Zur Bedeutung des Web 2.0 für den Wandel der (Erwerbs-)Arbeit, in: Soeffner, Hans-Georg (ed.): Transnationale Vergesellschaftungen: Verhandlungen des 35. Kongresses der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Soziologie in Frankfurt am Main 2010, Wiesbaden: Springer VS, CD-Rom, 1-13.

Carstensen, Tanja (2009): Gender Trouble in Web 2.0: Gender Relations in Social Network Sites, Wikis and Weblogs, in: International Journal of Gender, Science and Technology, vol. 1, no. 1: http://genderandset.open.ac.uk/index.php/genderandset/article/view/18

Carstensen, Tanja (2007): Die interpretative Herstellung des Internet. Eine empirische Analyse technikbezogener Deutungsmuster am Beispiel gewerkschaftlicher Diskurse, Bielefeld.