This event is part of the RECET Festival of Historical and Social Sciences "Transformations of Labor".
Event venue: Campus of the University of Vienna („Altes AKH“), festival tent in Hof 1
Position of the tent: https://goo.gl/maps/8FjYQNtdnaUiKCcs6
Roundtable Discussion with Sebastian Felten (University of Vienna), Jana Hunter (Stanford), Paul Kreitman (Columbia), Sławomir Łotysz (Polish Academy of Sciences), moderated by Rosamund Johnston (RECET).
Long before taxi drivers shut down city center streets to protest ride-sharing apps, rewards were being offered to catch those textile workers who, in the Luddite protests, "wantonly and feloniously" smashed the knitting frames they held responsible for their impoverishment. In our roundtable, we consider these and other ways in which people have collectively organized against—or for—the roll-out of new (and not so new) technologies in the workplace. We also reflect upon some of the numerous historical moments in which labor and technology were not pitted against each other in such a zero-sum, antagonistic way.
Likewise, dreaming and worrying about what technology might do to your job is nothing new. From early modern Central Europe to twentieth-century Japan, we discuss how the relationship between labor and technology was understood to be in flux—by policymakers, business and technocratic elites, academics, and laborers themselves. Beyond triumphalist/ alarmist narratives of "disruption," we reflect upon the labor practices that particular technologies have been designed to reinforce, as well as the forms of labor that technological roll-out has rendered invisible. Ultimately, we ask how technology has historically reworked class, race, and gender relations within the workplace, and indeed our very conceptions of what constitutes "work."
Sebastian Felten studied history at the Humboldt-Universität Berlin and King's College London, where he received his PhD in 2015. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin and Stanford University, and is currently associate professor of Early Modern History of Science at the University of Vienna. His first book, Money in the Dutch Republic (Cambridge University Press, 2022), explores how everyday practices of exchange shaped and sustained plural monetary systems in the early modern world. His current research, supported by an ERC Starting Grant, examines the administration of mineral resource extraction in Central Europe between 1550 and 1850. He is co-speaker of the Research Cluster “History of Science” at the University of Vienna, recipient of the City of Vienna’s Förderungspreis (2025), and elected member of the Young Academy at the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Jana Hunter is Assistant Professor of History at Stanford University, where she works on modern Central and Eastern Europe with particular interests in time, science and technology, modernity, and environmental change. Her first book project, Times of Modernity: Bohemia from Revolution to Republic, 1848–1918, uses time as a lens to rethink the making of modern Central Europe. Rather than treating modern time as a single, accelerating rhythm, the study examines the coexistence of natural and industrial, religious and secular, nationalist and imperial, and mechanical and subjective temporalities that structured everyday life in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Bohemia. Moving from rural villages and mining towns to Prague's municipal councils and the Reichsrat, the book reconstructs how local actors reworked temporal regimes to serve imperial, national, regional, and commercial aims, offering a new framework for understanding modernization beyond the categories of nation and empire. Her second project, Testing Grounds: From Marx to Oppenheimer—Czechoslovakia's Global Legacy, 1918–Present, traces how twentieth-century ideologies of modernity were lived, imposed, and resisted through the uranium-mining town of Jáchymov. Once dubbed the "cradle of the atomic bomb," Jáchymov became a testing ground for successive empires and energy regimes, its landscape transformed by extractive ambition, political violence, and environmental fallout. Bringing Karl Marx's ecological critique into dialogue with J. Robert Oppenheimer's nuclear physics, the project reframes the history of militarized landscapes and energy transitions, situating East-Central Europe within global histories of extraction and environmental change. Hunter received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 2024 and her M.Phil. from the University of Cambridge. She has held fellowships at Princeton University, the Czech Academy of Sciences, the University of Vienna, and the Herder Institute. Before joining Stanford, she was a Lecturer in Modern European History at New College, Oxford.
Paul Kreitman is a research scholar at the Columbia University Weatherhead East Asian Institute. He is a historian of modern Japan whose work explores the relationship between environment, labour and technology in Japan and the wider Pacific world. His book Japan's Ocean Borderlands: Nature and Sovereignty (Cambridge University Press, 2023) explores how bird hunters, fishermen, guano miners and nature conservationists worked on and claimed an array of oceanic atolls stretching from Hawai'i to the South China Sea. He has also written on night soil collection in Tokyo during and after World War II, showing how wartime labour and fuel shortages disrupted the distribution networks that transported excrement from urban latrines to the fields on the outskirts of the city, precipitating a widespread sanitary crisis. He is currently working on a history of the Japanese convenience store (konbini) that explores how refrigerated supply chains, Fordist production techniques and shifting retail legislation shaped foodways and work patterns in and beyond modern Japan. Paul is also the founder and director of Columbia Summer in Itoshima, a study abroad program that uses physical labour (e.g. soil restoration, paddy field maintenance and oyster aquaculture) to teach students about Japanese environmental history. He has also written on a number of topics in publications such as The Financial Times, The New Statesman, The Japan Times, the Asahi Shimbun, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Sławomir Łotysz is a historian of science, medicine and technology with a particular interest in environmental history. His most recent major work is the award-winning book The Pripet Marshes. Nature, Knowledge and Politics in Polish Polesie until 1945 (Polish title: Pińskie Błota. Natura, wiedza i polityka na polskim Polesiu do 1945 roku, Kraków 2022), which studies the environmental history of Europe's largest wetlands. In his previous monograph, Factories as Aid: Penicillin Beyond the Iron Curtain, 1945–54 (Polish: Fabryka z darów. Penicylina za żelazną kurtyną 1945-1954, Warsaw, 2020), Sławomir analysed the political, social and medical aspects of disseminating knowledge on penicillin production in Eastern Europe. Sławomir was recently the Principal Investigator in an international research project entitled 'Media and Epidemics: Technologies of Science Communication and Public Health in the 20th and 21st Centuries, which was funded through the EU-funded CHANSE (Collaboration of Humanities and Social Sciences in Europe) programme. He has also participated in other international research projects, including “Making Europe” (funded by the Dutch Foundation for the History of Technology and hosted at Eindhoven University of Technology) and “ExpertTurn” (funded by the Czech Science Foundation and hosted at the Czech Academy of Sciences). Sławomir was an Andrew Mellon Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Wassenaar from 2014 to 2015 and a Charles Price Fellow at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia from 2007 to 2008. He was President of the International Committee for the History of Technology from 2017 to 2021 and a member of the Society for the History of Technology Nominating Committee from 2021 to 2023. He is currently a professor at the Institute of the History of Science of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.
Rosamund Johnston is the Principal Investigator of Linking Arms: Central Europe´s Weapons Sector, 1954-1994 at the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET), University of Vienna. She is the author of the award-winning Red Tape: Radio and Politics in Czechoslovakia, 1945-1969 which appeared with Stanford University Press in 2024. She has also written for Central European History, East European Politics and Societies, The Journal of Cold War Studies, East Central Europe, Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Scottish newspaper The National, and public broadcaster Czech Radio. Johnston is the editor of The Routledge Handbook of 1989 and the Great Transformation (2026), and has authored one book of public history, Havel in America: Interviews with American Intellectuals, Politicians, and Artists, released by Czech publisher Host in 2019.
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