Roundtable Discussion
RECET Festival of Historical and Social Sciences "Transformations of Labor"
University of Vienna
Sebastian Felten is participating at the round table discussion Labor and Technology at the University of Vienna.
Time: 15:00-17:00 CET, 10 June, 2026
Place: Campus of the University of Vienna („Altes AKH“), festival tent in Hof 1; Find the position of the tent.
The Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) is organising its 2026 three-day History and Social Sciences Festival entitled "Transformations of Labor", and this roundtable discussion on "Labor and Technology" is part of it. Our PI Sebastian Felten is participating alongside with 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."
Illustration for the History and Social Sciences Festival entitled "Transformations of Labor"
Sebastian Felten is a historian of science, finance, and bureaucracy in early modern Europe. He is Tenure Track Professor of Early Modern History of Science at the Department of History at the University of Vienna and was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin (MPIWG) between 2015 and 2018. He is the PI of the ERC Project SCARCE. His current research explores knowledge about nature through a focus on mineral resources as they featured in metallurgy, mineralogy, economics, and ergonomics. He has studied commerce and bureaucracy using the tools of historical epistemology to build bridges between the history of science and social, cultural and economic history. His objective for the next years is to apply this integrated approach to understand the peculiar rationality of early modern resource extraction in Central Europe, which was often highly contradictory.
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Funded by the European Union (ERC, SCARCE, Grant number 101076422). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
