current work

An anthropologist of emerging media, I study urban space, social class, and placemaking online. My book, Mobile City (Cornell UP, January 2025), details mobile and social media practices among an emerging “creative class” in Berlin between 2007-2015. Learn more here!

Book cover for Mobile City; three circles with silhouettes of people walking through Berlin looking at thier phones, on a light cream background with a matrix of dots in the black, red, and gold of the German flag.

I’ve conducted ethnographic research in Berlin, the U.S., and other parts of Europe on how young, mobile users connect at multiple geographic levels on Facebook and mobile phones. These connections are reshaping everyday experiences of space and place by reconfiguring spatial scales such as the local, translocal, or global.

My prior research includes two projects, Divergent Spaces, an SSRC-funded original fieldwork study of digital platforms, gentrification, and neighborhood organizing, and Terra Incognita, with Dr. Mona Sloane, on digital publics during COVID-19 in NYC, for New_ Public.

I also write and speak about how urban middle classes take shape in the context of increasing precarity and the casualization of labor. I have written essays about the cultural rather than economic anxieties of the white middle class in the U.S., the invisible labor of academic precarity, the unpaid digital labor of content creation, and how social media merged with news reading, and presented on issues of identity and representation in ethnographic research.

From 2019 to 2021, I taught courses on queer and feminist studies of science and technology at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering. I also consulted as an ethnographic researcher, including with Implosion Labs for the ADL on trolling & cyberharassment, and for Civic Signals on mapping NYC’s digital public spaces during COVID19.

Please contact me for copies of my publications for personal use. You can also follow me on Bluesky (@jordanaut.bsky.social) or LinkedIn or contact me at jordan @ jordankraemer.com.

past projects