In the course of the Europe-wide Schiller celebrations commemorating the centenary of Friedrich Schiller's birth, a Schillerverein (Schiller Society) was founded in Trieste 1859. It was made up of members of different ethnicities and religious confessions. One of the main aims of the society was to contribute to the cultural life of Trieste by means of (popular) scholarly lectures, concerts, theater performances, dances, and excursions.

Cruise ships are at the same time among the most popular and most controversial means of travel. Photos of oversized ships, passing through the historic center of Venice, have become iconic. This paper explores the background of the debate over cruise ships in Venice. Using research at the intersection of culture and technology, the history of technology, urban anthropology, and social movement theory, it sheds light on how the spatialization of the cruise industry through infrastructures affects Venice and the lagoon. In this paper, I will retrace the development of these interdependencies to show how activists, associations, and citizen campaigners address and perform these entanglements. Protest has turned the ship into a powerful symbol for the infrastructural appropriation and transformation of natural and urban space. Since transportation and traffic routes influence people’s everyday lives, it is important to consider their impacts on practices, spaces, and relations, especially in a city like Venice, where footpaths and waterways form an important element of the identity of both the city and its inhabitants. Through its actions, its tacit knowledge of local space, and the explicit knowledge the protest network produces, it both opposes and adds to hegemonic discourses. I argue that the cruise ship has been transformed into a metaphor of global capitalism, which in turn renders it a symbol with transnational impact.

Global developments like the introduction of the container since the 1960s strongly influenced work structures and spaces of action for dock workers. This article looks at the experiences of these workers and their positioning within this process. It presents some central findings of my PhD dissertation, an empirical study analysing the narrations of former Hamburg dock workers about spatial and socio-cultural transformations. Only a few years after the arrival of the container in Hamburg, skilled professions replaced traditional ones in order to secure container handling. These structural transformations led to better social and financial conditions of those able to continue their work and resulted in changed self-images of those pursuing a career. Besides the technical transformation, a parallel process of musealisation of dock work took place, documenting these developments. The involvement and commitment of former workers in the Harbour Museum further indicate a shift in the economic and cultural capital of some protagonists.

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