Looking back with Postdoc Daniela Stoltenberg

LolMyPaper. If I had to summarize my PhD thesis in a nutshell, I would say: Turns out people care a lot about the city center, but don’t give a rat’s behind about the periphery.

(Title: Issue Spatiality and Socio-Spatial Inequality: The Geographic Distribution of Visibility in Urban Public Spheres on Social Media)

It’s all about that space. I have worked with translocality a lot. Translocality describes the idea that people form connection with places across geographical distance based on personal meaningfulness, without necessarily remaining tied to a particular territory or nation state. In our project, we investigated how such translocal connections become actualized in digital communication, be it in the ties people form to each other or in the ways they talk about different places beyond their physical location.

Looking back, the advice I would give to my past self as I was just starting out in academia is this: Be kind and try to make sure that the people around you feel good about the work you are doing together.

A day in a life. Beyond getting up, having breakfast, and then going to sit at a desk somewhere, there really is no typical day in my life as a postdoc. During some periods, I spend the entire day reading or working on data analysis. Other days, admin work eats up the majority of my time (travel applications, ahoy!). And sometimes, I will be in four back-to-back meetings. I do try to at least structure my day each morning and set some realistic goals.

It’s all about the spatial arrangement. My ideal writing setting depends. For a lot of tasks involving literature research or data analysis, I rely on a large second screen, so I need to be at my desk at the office or at home. But when it really just comes down to putting words on the page, I like sitting on my balcony. You can hear the wind in the trees and sometimes there are foxes, bunnies, or racoons in the backyard, so it’s rather idyllic.

When you know, you know. The most surprising thing for me about doing a PhD and a postdoc was just how much more freedom the postdoc granted me in terms of setting your own priorities and making your own schedule. It’s equal parts liberating and disorienting not to have “one big project” to think about all the time.

Back to the future. If I were to give advice to new researchers starting out in the next phase of the CRC, it would be this: Find your people and establish a personal support system. Help and advice always come from specific people, not vague institutions.

Author Bio: Dr. Daniela Stoltenberg is a postdoctoral researcher at Freie Universität Berlin and the CRC 1265 in the subproject B05 “Translocal Networks.” Her research interests lie in communication geography, digital public spheres, new social movements, and computational research methods.