The CCL is excited to announce Daniela Stoltenberg as guest lecturer and visitor of the CCL! During her visit in early December, Daniela will share her research in our lab meeting, give a guest lecture on community detection, and participate in a collaborative workshop with members of our lab. Below, you can find more information about her upcoming presentation and her academic background.

Title: Scaling Lützerath: Anatomy of a Local Movement

Abstract:

Lützerath, a tiny village in the western German coalmining region of North Rhine-Westphalia, gained symbolic notoriety in 2022/23 when it became a major squat of climate activists who contended that the nation’s goal of limiting climate change to 1.5°C depended on the village’s preservation. The movement mobilized across all major social media platform and tied Lützerath to geographic scales ranging from local environmental destruction up to global issues of climate justice. The paper examines how spatial elements, particularly the tension between local and global issues, manifest on digital platforms. Bringing together research on contentious digital action, scaling, and place-framing, we investigate how movement communication on the ground is scaled up to generate broader relevance in digital spaces. Drawing on a hashtag-based dataset of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter posts, we investigate platform differences, development over time, and differences in topical context, all in relation to which places and scales activists make relevant in their discussion of Lützerath. Preliminary results show that while Twitter is used more as a blow-by-blow information source for protest on the ground, Facebook and Instagram are used more frequently to narrate stories about what events in Lützerath means locally and its broader impact on places near and far.

• Date of CCL presentation: December 4, 15:00 (PC Room 1, Kolingasse 14-16) 
• External participants need to register with Sarah Epp-Kampl and can also join via Zoom.

Bio:

Dr. Daniela Stoltenberg is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, and the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center 1265 “Re-Figuration of Spaces”. Her research interests include digital social movements, the relationship between communication and space, as well as computational and mixed-methods research designs.