People

Rabea Berfelde

Associate Member

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rberf001@gold.ac.uk

CV

  • Since 09|2018

    PhD Cultural Studies; Goldsmiths, University of London; Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

  • Since 2020

    PhD Scholar of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes

  • 2017 - 2018

    MA Cultural Studies; Goldsmiths, University of London; Department of Media, Communications and Cultural Studies

  • 2013 - 2017

    BA Political Science; Freie Universität Berlin

  • 2016

    Semester funded by Erasmus+; Universidad Complutense de Madrid

  • 2015

    Semester funded by Erasmus+; Institute d’études politiques de Paris (Sciences Po)

  • Teaching

  • Summer Semester 2021

    Program Management; MA Culture Industry; Goldsmiths, University of London

  • Summer Semester 2021

    Associate Lecturer; Practices of the Culture Industry (MA); Vorlesung und Seminar; Goldsmiths, University of London

  • Winter Semester 2020/21

    Teaching; Feministische Kapitalismuskritik? Zwischen Queerfeminismus und Marxismus (BA); Proseminar, Freie Universität Berlin

  • Summer Semester 2020

    Associate Lecturer; Global Cultural Politics (BA); Goldsmiths, University of London

  • Winter Semester 18/19

    Teaching; Einführung in die Theorien der Biopolitik (BA); Proseminar, Freie Universität Berlin

Research Focus

    • urban social movements

    • financialised urbanism

    • platform, digital labour

Dissertation

In the Urban Factory. The Reconfiguration of Labour and Urban Space in Berlin

Abstract
My research advances an understanding of the interconnections between emerging urbanisms, modes of urban accumulation and their relationship to diverse forms of labour agency, practices and politics. It examines the reconfiguration of urban places of production and reproduction under financialised economies and the lived experience of precarity within these processes by taking Berlin as the field of inquiry. It is asked how financialisation—a process whereby a shift in importance from industrial production to the financial sector takes place—leads to a proliferation of rent-seeking strategies that impact urban economies (Hardt and Negri 2009) and intersects with the multiplication of forms and sites of labour (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013).
The reconfiguration of urban places of production and reproduction is analysed in relation to two case studies: (1) new office economies and (2) Airbnb’s operations in urban space. Both are emblematic sites of financialised economies because, besides their rhetoric of fostering the “sharing” of space, they induce individual entrepreneurship and facilitate the economisation of both social relations as well as common spaces. Furthermore, they shed light on the convergence between tech and urban (real estate) speculation in contemporary cities.

Publications

    • Berfelde, Rabea and Kluzik, Vicky. forthcoming. ‘Platforms Becoming Infrastructural? Mapping Socio-Spatial Transformations’. In Platformization of Urban Life. Towards a Technocapitalist Transformation of European Cities, edited by Anke Strüver and Sybille Bauriedl. Bielefeld: Transcript.

    • Berfelde, Rabea. forthcoming. ‘Airbnb: Leveraging the Crisis of Care to Become Essential Urban
      Infrastructure’. In On Platforming. Digital Capitalism and Its Aftermath., edited by Into the Black Box. I Quaderni Di Into the Black Box. Bologna: University of Bologna Press.

    • Berfelde, Rabea. 2022. ‘Platform Alterations. How Covid-Hit Airbnb Reinvented Itself … as Privatised Urban Infrastructure’. The Sociological Review (blog). 2022. https://thesociologicalreview.org/magazine/february-2022/covid-refigurations/platform-alterations/.

    • Berfelde, Rabea. 2021a. ‘Das Reproduktionsmodell von Airbnb: Wohnraum “teilen” Im Kontext Krisenhafter Sozial-Reproduktiver Verhältnisse’. In Plattformkapitalismus Und Die Krise Der Sozialen Reproduktion, edited by Moritz Altenried, Julia Dück, and Mira Wallis, 130–47. Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot.

    • Berfelde, Rabea. 2021b. ‘Enacting “the Right to the Creative City” in Berlin’. In Art and Gentrification in the Changing Neoliberal Urban Landscape, edited by Tijen Tunali, 108–24. New York: Routledge.

    • Berfelde, Rabea. 2020. ‘Dialektische Methodologie Vor Dem Hintergrund Planetarischer Urbanisierung. Rezension Zu Neil Brenner (2019): New Urban Spaces. Urban Theory and the Scale Question’. Sub\urban. Zeitschrift Für Kritische Stadtforschung 8 (3): 257–61.

    • Berfelde, Rabea/Kluzik, Vicky/ Peters, Nils (2020). “Platformisation Beyond the Crisis-Reflections on a Multidisciplinary Workshop”, https://www.perc.org.uk/project_posts/platformisation-beyond-the-crisis-reflections-on-a-multidisciplinary-workshop/.

    • Berfelde, Rabea. 2019. ‘Urban Citizenship as Cuidadanía. On Urban Social Movements Redefining the Neighbourhood as an Infrastructure of Care’. Éngagée, no. 08: 18–22.

  • Talks

    • RC21 Conference Sensing the City/Place, People, Power; University of Antwerp, Juli 2021; Paper “Looking at Airbnb in Berlin through the lens of Social Reproduction”

    • RGS-IBG Annual International Conference; London, September 2021; Paper “The Reconfiguration of Urban Places of Production and Reproduction. The Case of Airbnb in Berlin”

    • Platform Urbanism. Towards a technocapitalist transformation of European cities?; Online Symposium, Universität Graz, März 2021; Workshop “Platforms becoming Infrastructural? Mapping Socio-Spatial Transformations” zusammen mit Vicky Kluzik (Goethe Universität, Frankfurt am Main)

    • Covid Re-figuring Daily Life and Social Economies: A Pandemic Observatory, Workshop, Technische Universität Berlin, Juni 2021; Paper “Airbnb: Leveraging the Crisis of Care to Become Essential Urban Infrastructure”

    • Plattformkapitalismus und die Krise der Sozialen Reproduktion, Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung Berlin, August 2021; Buchpräsentation

    • Fourth International Conference on Cultural Political Economy, Staffordshire University, Stoke-on-Trent, Januar 2020; Paper “Platform Capitalism and the Crisis of Social Reproduction: The Case of Airbnb in Berlin”

    • Radical Housing Encounters: Translocal Conversations on Knowledge and Praxis; Barcelona, San Cristóbal de Las Casas, Lancaster

    • Mediating the Crisis: Platformisation and Covid-19, Goldsmiths, University of London, November 2020, Workshoporganisation

    • Historical Materialism Conference, London, November 2019; Paper “Neighbourhood Inquiries as Feminist Class Politics”