Tanja Schneider
Biographic Data
| ID | 88669 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tanja Schneider |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tanja |
| FAMILY NAME | Schneider |
| SIGNATURE | SCHNEIDER T |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of St.Gallen |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8045-4691 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 47 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2010 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Thinking tech oligarchy through venture capitalization
The scene has been widely discussed: at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on January 20, 2025, the Washington stage featured not only Elon Musk – an outspoken supporter of Trump’s campaign, ...
Infrastructural Participation in Digital Societies
User and citizen participation in the form of micro-actions scripted by digital systems has become indispensable to the functioning of government and society. In this article, we introduce the concept of ‘infrastructural participation’ to evaluate this phenomenon and investigate empirical instances of it in four topical areas: automated vehicles, digital education, citizen science and data protection. We formulate four societal challenges arising…
Interactions at sea
The marine phycosphere is a microscale mucosal region of microbiomes surrounding a phytoplankton cell. The phycosphere (analogous to the terrestrial rhizosphere) is where microbial interactions navigate the biochemistry of the sea. The study of this microsphere deals with the causal relation enigma between two spatiotemporal scales: the micro-communal interactions and the macro-level of the biogeochemical cycles (Stocker, Science, 338(6107), 628-…
The Metabolic Microbe
This paper examines the historical split of microbiology into the fields of medicine and ecology from a feminist perspective, using Helen Longino’s contextual empiricism and her onto-epistemic view of interactions. Examining microbial interactions is interesting for two reasons, one is ontological as microbial metabolic interactions constitute the bio-geo-chemical cycles that are the driving force of life on Earth. The second reason is epistemic,…
Digital eating
This special issue examines how digitalisation is transforming the conditions under which eating is organised, valued, and contested in everyday life, focusing on the reconfiguration of expertise, choice, and care. While existing scholarship often treats the platformisation of culinary labour, the datafication of food production, and the digital mediation of food culture as separate, this special issue conceptualises them as interlinked through t…
Automating Dietary Expertise
Digitally tracking food and eating has become a widespread activity. Scholars in anthropology, sociology and science and technology studies have problematised the personal and social implications of dietary tracking and the metrification of food and eating. Metrification has contributed to the emergence of new types of relevant expertise and new experts of eating and health. This warrants in-depth research to better understand the forming, negoti…
More of the same? How digital food platforms reinforce prevailing eating interests and practices
The digital labor of ethical food consumption
This paper explores how consumers’ ethical food consumption practices, mediated by mobile phone applications (apps), are transformed into digital data. Based on a review of studies on the digitalization of ethical consumption practices and food apps, we find that previous research, while valuable, fails to acknowledge and critically examine the digital labor required to perform digitalized ethical food consumption. In this paper, we call for rese…
Different Meaning in Different Sizes
Any given ecosystem includes macro- and micro-organismal ecology. I examine the concept of stability and its meaning in these two size scales. Historically, the stability concept follows species population dynamics and equilibrium. In micro-ecology, however, classification is rare and, in the majority of cases, not possible. Therefore, the microbial taxonomic composition is regarded in a nonspecific way, as opposed to animals and plant communitie…
Enacting the 'consuming' brain
The figure of the brain has continued to rise in prominence for at least 30 years. This development continues to raise important questions: in particular, to what extent and in what ways does the brain supplant the person as the presumed origin of human behaviour? Whereas it has previously been discussed in general terms, here we address this question through an ethnographic study of the experimental articulation of the brain in neuromarketing re…
Science and Technology Studies: Die Datafizierung von Alltagspraktiken
Tanja Schneider, Klaus Fuchs und Simon Mayer widmen sich in ihrem Beitrag der zunehmenden Datafizierung von Alltagspraktiken und den damit einhergehenden neuen Verantwortungen der Konsumenten*innen aus der Perspektive der Science and Technology Studies (STS). Dabei stellen sie Praktiken des Konsums in den Mittelpunkt, und zwar, wie das Einkaufsverhalten der Konsument*innen digital erfasst und verwertet wird. Am Beispiel ihres kollaborativen und i…
The holobiont self
Witness and Silence in Neuromarketing
Over the past decades commercial and academic market(ing) researchers have studied consumers through a range of different methods including surveys, focus groups, or interviews. More recently, some have turned to the growing field of neuroscience to understand consumers. Neuromarketing employs brain imaging, scanning, or other brain measurement technologies to capture consumers' (brain) responses to marketing stimuli and to circumvent the "proble…
Governance by campaign
This paper considers food as a site of public engagement with science and technology. Specifically, we focus on how public engagement with food is envisioned and operationalised by one non-profit organisation, foodwatch. Founded in Germany in 2002, foodwatch extensively uses new information and communication technologies to inform consumers about problematic food industry practices. In this paper, we present our analysis of 50 foodwatch e-newslet…
The knowing mother
The caring mother is one of the most recurring images of femininity in post-war advertising. We examine how mothers are depicted as knowing consumers in advertisements in Australian Women’s Weekly and the United Kingdom’s Good Housekeeping magazines between 1950 and 2010. Our data suggest that although visual representations of maternal consumer knowledge change over this period, assumptions about the responsibilities of mothers endure in the fam…
Food and Health
In many parts of the world the relationship between food and health is predominately defined by a nutritional and medical discourse today. This discourse focuses on food intake as a core determinant of individual bodily and mental health, prevention of under‐ or overweight, and of future diseases. Sociologists and other social scientists, however, have a broader understanding of the relationship between food and health and emphasize how cultural …
Capitalising on Curiosity
The study of markets and marketisation has become a prominent topic in Science and Technology Studies (STS) over the last two decades. A recent example of this development is Pinch and Swedberg’s (
Mobile activism, material imaginings, and the ethics of the edible
Neuromarketing in the making
Neuroscience beyond the laboratory
Endless Qualifications, Restless Consumption
Functional foods and foods derived from genetically modified organisms represent two forms of intervention in the design of foodstuffs that have given rise to distinct political and regulatory dynamics. In Europe, regulatory agencies have tried, unsuccessfully, to affix a definitive legal meaning to these categories of food artificiality. This incomplete process of legal disambiguation has gone hand in hand with the delegation of the responsibili…
Technologies of ironic revelation
Neuroscience is increasingly considered a possible basis for new business and management practices. A prominent example of this trend is neuromarketing – a relatively new form of market and consumer research that applies neuroscience to marketing by employing brain imaging or measurement technology to anticipate consumers’ response to, for instance, products, packaging or advertising. In this paper, we draw attention to the ways in which certain …
Fostering a hunger for health
Over the past decade consumers in Australia and elsewhere have increasingly been confronted with a fast growing number of health food products. This profusion of health foods is accompanied by a proliferation in popular culture of professional nutritional advice on what is 'good to eat'. The genre of lifestyle magazines is one popular medium via which healthy practices and health foods are frequently reported. In this paper we use a visual discou…
Advertising food in Australia
Over the past half century, consumers in Australia have increasingly been confronted with a plethora of health food products. This paper focuses on health food that encourages consumption through the promise of health benefits. In this context, media representation of such food serves as a lens to explore the spread of consumer culture in Australia. Using a historical perspective, this paper asserts that in promoting such foods, food "experts" fo…
The myth of the value-free biological individual
Technologies of ironic revelation
Neuroscience is increasingly considered a possible basis for new business and management practices. A prominent example of this trend is neuromarketing – a relatively new form of market and consumer research that applies neuroscience to marketing by employing brain imaging or measurement technology to anticipate consumers’ response to, for instance, products, packaging or advertising. In this paper, we draw attention to the ways in which certain …
Mobile activism, material imaginings, and the ethics of the edible
Fostering a hunger for health
Over the past decade consumers in Australia and elsewhere have increasingly been confronted with a fast growing number of health food products. This profusion of health foods is accompanied by a proliferation in popular culture of professional nutritional advice on what is 'good to eat'. The genre of lifestyle magazines is one popular medium via which healthy practices and health foods are frequently reported. In this paper we use a visual discou…
Advertising food in Australia
Over the past half century, consumers in Australia have increasingly been confronted with a plethora of health food products. This paper focuses on health food that encourages consumption through the promise of health benefits. In this context, media representation of such food serves as a lens to explore the spread of consumer culture in Australia. Using a historical perspective, this paper asserts that in promoting such foods, food "experts" fo…
Witness and Silence in Neuromarketing
Over the past decades commercial and academic market(ing) researchers have studied consumers through a range of different methods including surveys, focus groups, or interviews. More recently, some have turned to the growing field of neuroscience to understand consumers. Neuromarketing employs brain imaging, scanning, or other brain measurement technologies to capture consumers' (brain) responses to marketing stimuli and to circumvent the "proble…
The knowing mother
The caring mother is one of the most recurring images of femininity in post-war advertising. We examine how mothers are depicted as knowing consumers in advertisements in Australian Women’s Weekly and the United Kingdom’s Good Housekeeping magazines between 1950 and 2010. Our data suggest that although visual representations of maternal consumer knowledge change over this period, assumptions about the responsibilities of mothers endure in the fam…
The digital labor of ethical food consumption
This paper explores how consumers’ ethical food consumption practices, mediated by mobile phone applications (apps), are transformed into digital data. Based on a review of studies on the digitalization of ethical consumption practices and food apps, we find that previous research, while valuable, fails to acknowledge and critically examine the digital labor required to perform digitalized ethical food consumption. In this paper, we call for rese…
Automating Dietary Expertise
Digitally tracking food and eating has become a widespread activity. Scholars in anthropology, sociology and science and technology studies have problematised the personal and social implications of dietary tracking and the metrification of food and eating. Metrification has contributed to the emergence of new types of relevant expertise and new experts of eating and health. This warrants in-depth research to better understand the forming, negoti…
Different Meaning in Different Sizes
Any given ecosystem includes macro- and micro-organismal ecology. I examine the concept of stability and its meaning in these two size scales. Historically, the stability concept follows species population dynamics and equilibrium. In micro-ecology, however, classification is rare and, in the majority of cases, not possible. Therefore, the microbial taxonomic composition is regarded in a nonspecific way, as opposed to animals and plant communitie…
The holobiont self
Fostering a hunger for health
Over the past decade consumers in Australia and elsewhere have increasingly been confronted with a fast growing number of health food products. This profusion of health foods is accompanied by a proliferation in popular culture of professional nutritional advice on what is 'good to eat'. The genre of lifestyle magazines is one popular medium via which healthy practices and health foods are frequently reported. In this paper we use a visual discou…
Advertising food in Australia
Over the past half century, consumers in Australia have increasingly been confronted with a plethora of health food products. This paper focuses on health food that encourages consumption through the promise of health benefits. In this context, media representation of such food serves as a lens to explore the spread of consumer culture in Australia. Using a historical perspective, this paper asserts that in promoting such foods, food "experts" fo…
Endless Qualifications, Restless Consumption
Functional foods and foods derived from genetically modified organisms represent two forms of intervention in the design of foodstuffs that have given rise to distinct political and regulatory dynamics. In Europe, regulatory agencies have tried, unsuccessfully, to affix a definitive legal meaning to these categories of food artificiality. This incomplete process of legal disambiguation has gone hand in hand with the delegation of the responsibili…
Technologies of ironic revelation
Neuroscience is increasingly considered a possible basis for new business and management practices. A prominent example of this trend is neuromarketing – a relatively new form of market and consumer research that applies neuroscience to marketing by employing brain imaging or measurement technology to anticipate consumers’ response to, for instance, products, packaging or advertising. In this paper, we draw attention to the ways in which certain …
Neuromarketing in the making
Neuroscience beyond the laboratory
Mobile activism, material imaginings, and the ethics of the edible
Capitalising on Curiosity
The study of markets and marketisation has become a prominent topic in Science and Technology Studies (STS) over the last two decades. A recent example of this development is Pinch and Swedberg’s (
Governance by campaign
This paper considers food as a site of public engagement with science and technology. Specifically, we focus on how public engagement with food is envisioned and operationalised by one non-profit organisation, foodwatch. Founded in Germany in 2002, foodwatch extensively uses new information and communication technologies to inform consumers about problematic food industry practices. In this paper, we present our analysis of 50 foodwatch e-newslet…
The knowing mother
The caring mother is one of the most recurring images of femininity in post-war advertising. We examine how mothers are depicted as knowing consumers in advertisements in Australian Women’s Weekly and the United Kingdom’s Good Housekeeping magazines between 1950 and 2010. Our data suggest that although visual representations of maternal consumer knowledge change over this period, assumptions about the responsibilities of mothers endure in the fam…
Food and Health
In many parts of the world the relationship between food and health is predominately defined by a nutritional and medical discourse today. This discourse focuses on food intake as a core determinant of individual bodily and mental health, prevention of under‐ or overweight, and of future diseases. Sociologists and other social scientists, however, have a broader understanding of the relationship between food and health and emphasize how cultural …
Witness and Silence in Neuromarketing
Over the past decades commercial and academic market(ing) researchers have studied consumers through a range of different methods including surveys, focus groups, or interviews. More recently, some have turned to the growing field of neuroscience to understand consumers. Neuromarketing employs brain imaging, scanning, or other brain measurement technologies to capture consumers' (brain) responses to marketing stimuli and to circumvent the "proble…
Science and Technology Studies: Die Datafizierung von Alltagspraktiken
Tanja Schneider, Klaus Fuchs und Simon Mayer widmen sich in ihrem Beitrag der zunehmenden Datafizierung von Alltagspraktiken und den damit einhergehenden neuen Verantwortungen der Konsumenten*innen aus der Perspektive der Science and Technology Studies (STS). Dabei stellen sie Praktiken des Konsums in den Mittelpunkt, und zwar, wie das Einkaufsverhalten der Konsument*innen digital erfasst und verwertet wird. Am Beispiel ihres kollaborativen und i…
The holobiont self
The digital labor of ethical food consumption
This paper explores how consumers’ ethical food consumption practices, mediated by mobile phone applications (apps), are transformed into digital data. Based on a review of studies on the digitalization of ethical consumption practices and food apps, we find that previous research, while valuable, fails to acknowledge and critically examine the digital labor required to perform digitalized ethical food consumption. In this paper, we call for rese…
Different Meaning in Different Sizes
Any given ecosystem includes macro- and micro-organismal ecology. I examine the concept of stability and its meaning in these two size scales. Historically, the stability concept follows species population dynamics and equilibrium. In micro-ecology, however, classification is rare and, in the majority of cases, not possible. Therefore, the microbial taxonomic composition is regarded in a nonspecific way, as opposed to animals and plant communitie…
Enacting the 'consuming' brain
The figure of the brain has continued to rise in prominence for at least 30 years. This development continues to raise important questions: in particular, to what extent and in what ways does the brain supplant the person as the presumed origin of human behaviour? Whereas it has previously been discussed in general terms, here we address this question through an ethnographic study of the experimental articulation of the brain in neuromarketing re…
The myth of the value-free biological individual
Infrastructural Participation in Digital Societies
User and citizen participation in the form of micro-actions scripted by digital systems has become indispensable to the functioning of government and society. In this article, we introduce the concept of ‘infrastructural participation’ to evaluate this phenomenon and investigate empirical instances of it in four topical areas: automated vehicles, digital education, citizen science and data protection. We formulate four societal challenges arising…
Interactions at sea
The marine phycosphere is a microscale mucosal region of microbiomes surrounding a phytoplankton cell. The phycosphere (analogous to the terrestrial rhizosphere) is where microbial interactions navigate the biochemistry of the sea. The study of this microsphere deals with the causal relation enigma between two spatiotemporal scales: the micro-communal interactions and the macro-level of the biogeochemical cycles (Stocker, Science, 338(6107), 628-…
The Metabolic Microbe
This paper examines the historical split of microbiology into the fields of medicine and ecology from a feminist perspective, using Helen Longino’s contextual empiricism and her onto-epistemic view of interactions. Examining microbial interactions is interesting for two reasons, one is ontological as microbial metabolic interactions constitute the bio-geo-chemical cycles that are the driving force of life on Earth. The second reason is epistemic,…
Digital eating
This special issue examines how digitalisation is transforming the conditions under which eating is organised, valued, and contested in everyday life, focusing on the reconfiguration of expertise, choice, and care. While existing scholarship often treats the platformisation of culinary labour, the datafication of food production, and the digital mediation of food culture as separate, this special issue conceptualises them as interlinked through t…
Automating Dietary Expertise
Digitally tracking food and eating has become a widespread activity. Scholars in anthropology, sociology and science and technology studies have problematised the personal and social implications of dietary tracking and the metrification of food and eating. Metrification has contributed to the emergence of new types of relevant expertise and new experts of eating and health. This warrants in-depth research to better understand the forming, negoti…
More of the same? How digital food platforms reinforce prevailing eating interests and practices
Thinking tech oligarchy through venture capitalization
The scene has been widely discussed: at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on January 20, 2025, the Washington stage featured not only Elon Musk – an outspoken supporter of Trump’s campaign, ...
Political science (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Business (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Social science (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Law (6 works) · Advertising (5 works)