Bettine Josties is a Sociology PhD candidate at the New School for Social Research. She holds an MA and a BA in Social Sciences from Humboldt University of Berlin. Her current research interests are in political economy and the history and sociology of labor, as well as critical media, design, and dance studies. She also enjoys experimenting with different movement practices and art forms, which reflects in her increasingly practice-/arts-based approach to conducting interdisciplinary research.

Her dissertation research examines TikTok dances as a form of digital labor. Its goal is to situate the practice of dancing on and for TikTok within the broader history and context of executing physical labor in interaction with machines; to understand how this form of labor—and the mode of production crystallizing within it—is similar to and different from other forms of laboring in joint movement with machines; and how it is experienced by, reflected upon, and engaged with by those performing the dances.

To study this, Bettine conducts hybrid ethnographic research on TikTok dances and actively participates in the practice of producing and performing TikTok dances herself. On the one hand, she does this by immersing herself in already existing dance practices on TikTok and closely following and analyzing their socio-material script. On the other hand, she deliberately subverts already existing dance practices on TikTok, thereby pointing to the different ways in which they are conditioned and restricted.