Social media platforms are increasingly shaped by the integration of generative AI alongside long-standing analytical and predictive models. Today's algorithmic systems are moving from the background infrastructure to the forefront of digital social life – intervening in the content feeds as conversational agents like xAI's Grok, reshaping identity through synthetic likenesses of OpenAI's Sora-2, and expanding the social ecosystem itself through projects like Butterflies AI and Moltbook, where autonomous AI agents operate in coexistence with (or independently of) human users. As these developments rapidly outpace existing research frameworks, the need for mixed critical methodologies grows more urgent. 

Synthetic social media research takes as its starting point the recognition that platforms shaped by generative AI are not simply data-processing systems but cultural environments organized through algorithms, interfaces, and shared ways of feeling and knowing. Analytically, the attribute “synthetic” implies more than artificial arrangements of collective agency. Rather than treating AI as a radical rupture, it situates generative systems within broader arrangements of human-machine co-creation that amplify specific imaginaries, values, and concerns. Methodologically, it foregrounds ambiguities in how AI platforms recalibrate meaning and how users develop a practical “feel” for algorithmic systems while negotiating their constraints.

Critical digital methods have responded to these developments by treating chatbots and generative systems as part of the research design as well as objects of inquiry in their own right. Synthetic text, images, and sounds are no longer exceptional artifacts but common platform vernaculars, sustained by entangled practices of prompting, remixing, and circulation. Within platform studies, interface methods, visual digital methods, and emerging forms of synthetic ethnography, AI systems have been repurposed for formatting, summarization, annotation, labeling, and the generation of synthetic data, while being interrogated for how they shape knowledge production. This work has foregrounded questions of method: Are we merely studying AI slop, distracted by the automated excess of content stripped of context and meaning, or are we witnessing the redefinition of social media itself along with its affordances and cultures of use?

The 2026 Autumn School edition of the CRC “Media of Cooperation” tackles this question by focusing on generative AI as an infrastructural, cultural, and regulated component of social media platforms across three intersecting dimensions: At the cultural level of everyday use, it refers to the routinized practices of prompting or interacting with platform-embedded generative systems through multimodal inputs. Infrastructurally, it signals a shift in agency, as platforms keep multiplying affordances that nudge us into co-producing synthetic outputs. Finally, it foregrounds research techniques for probing AI models in their entanglements with the platform governance and moderation regimes. 

Against this background, we invite participants to submit short contributions inspired by, though not limited to, one of the following "how to" prompts: 

• How to repurpose AI personas as research personas 
• How to rethink walkthrough methods in light of platforms’ generative affordances 
• How to approach cultural biases conditioned by AI systems and prompt cultures
• How to study AI moderation as platform policy in action
• How to explore platform agency and its steering ideologies 
• How to integrate screenshots as a method for capturing synthetic situations 
• How to account for the ambiguities emerging from human-machine co-creation
• How to develop non-extractive approaches to researching AI platforms

Participants are invited to submit a short abstract (maximum 500 words excluding references) outlining how their work relates to the event’s theme. Presentations should raise questions or provocations rather than present finished research. Accepted abstracts will be grouped into thematic sessions and discussed in a collaborative, dialogue-focused format.

Submit your proposal by 30. April 2026
Notification of acceptance by 15 May 2026
Registration by 15 June 2026

The event opens with a one-day conference and moves into hands-on workshops and project work. Accepted abstracts will be grouped into thematic sessions curated by the organising team. Presenters will be connected via email ahead of time to coordinate their contributions. The first day is about presentations and discussions. The next three days are dedicated to exploring and developing methods - hands-on! We invite you to join a team of interdisciplinary scholars and data designers in probing new methodological combinations. Each of our project teams will present a research question alongside a specific method to be collaboratively explored. Please bring your laptops. The project titles will be announced soon. The event is free of charge, though attendees are responsible for arranging and covering their travel and accommodation in Siegen.

Sensoriality in social interaction has been a topic raising increasing interest in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) these last years (Fele 2019, Goodwin, MH 2017, Liberman 2022, Meyer & Meier 2016, Meyer 2021, Mondada 2018, 2021, Mondada & Cekaite 2020), expanding previous work on multimodality (Goodwin, C 2018, Mondada 2019) and inspired by insights coming from, amongst others, Scottish moral philosophy, early Simmelian insights, phenomenology, and the anthropology of the senses. The issue has been to put multisensoriality on the agenda of interaction studies, with a special focus on how sensorial and perceptual practices relating to, and establishing, the world and others are publicly and recognizably achieved and shared in social interaction.

Building on this background, this workshop further discusses multisensoriality in social interaction, and in particular the potentials and prospects of the concept of synaesthesia for interaction research. Here, synaesthesia is not understood as a clinical or psychological condition, but as an everyday practical phenomenon—inspired by its phenomenological sense developed, among others, by Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. On this view, our experience of the world already involves constant cross-sensory supplementation and translation—for example, visual experience is routinely complemented by, and intertwined with, other sensory familiarities. Sartre famously stated that we ‘see’ the sourness of a lemon: “each of its qualities is extended throughout each of the others. It is the sourness of the lemon which is yellow, it is the yellow of the lemon which is sour. We eat the color of a cake, and the taste of this cake is the instrument which reveals its shape and its color to what we may call the alimentary intuition.” Merleau-Ponty similarly describes glass: we see its “hardness and brittleness (…), and when, with a tinkling sound, it breaks, this sound is conveyed by the visible glass.” The issue is for us to reflect about these insights within an interactional framework and on the basis of video analysis, within the epistemology and methodology of EMCA.

While we do not doubt the ongoing cross-sensorial supplementation and translation during perception, it is the generality of such descriptions that we would like to examine and discuss in the workshop. E.g., when do they apply in general, and when are perceptions only manifested through specific senses, and not others, or are not at all cross-sensorial, according to the particularities of the interactional situation and activity? How are sensory experiences and synaesthesias made accountable and sequentially fed into interaction? So far, the complementarity, substitutability, translatability, and mutual elaboration of sensory modes has mainly been discussed in studies of the individual perceptor. In this workshop, we will discuss empirical studies showing how participants ongoingly accomplish and also presuppose this phenomenon for their co-participants, as part of the assumed „objectivity of the world“, and use it in interaction—both in (1) interactionally achieved co-perception and co-sensing of relevant objects and in (2) co-bodily (including intercorporeal) interaction, where participants make their sensory perceptions, orientations and access accountable to one another up to and including having co-experiences.

Registration/Contact:
All are welcome, please send a short e-mail until 22.09. to: clemens.eisenmann[æt]uni-konstanz.de

Histories of Tracking

Université de Luxembourg | Universität Siegen

September 30 – October 2, 2026

International conference jointly organised by the C²DH – University of Luxembourg and Universität Siegen

Surveillance has become ubiquitous in digital media environments and is now taken for granted. With every PayPal interaction, at the least more than 600 trackers eavesdrop on its transactional data (Schneier 2018). While there is no lack of critique on digital surveillance and its discontents, its ubiquity and naturalization itself require more explanation. Which historical and economical trajectories have led into the current escalation of digital tracking, tracing, monitoring, classification, intelligence service, and advertising? How can we discover and mobilize counter-points and narratives that explain digital surveillance otherwise? Do micro-level media, data, and sensor practices represent “yet another mutation of capitalism,” to quote from Gilles Deleuze’s famous Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990)? 

Tracking persons, emotions, objects, apparatuses, money, signs and data is a veritable environing technique. It is also one of the key business applications of platform and data economies, which provide for the infrastructures of state-side institutional surveillance and control. With our joint Luxembourg-Siegen conference on Histories of Tracking we aim to track the trackers historiographically, technologically, and ecologically.

In a seminal text, Phil Agre (2003 [1994]) has encouraged us to think about the difference between rather centralized regimes of (visual) surveillance and data-based institutional regimes of “capture.” Agre has paved the way for a logistical theory of digital surveillance that investigates its micropolitics. While non-visual alphanumeric modes of capturing data do not feel like surveillance, they nonetheless establish an ever more mundane and affective mode of ubiquitous surveillance. What if we follow Agre’s analysis of institutional “grammars of action” that afford a whole spectrum of capturing, monitoring, sensing, and surveillant practices? Histories of tracking, we assume, are histories of the institutions, corporations, and agencies that create the tapestry of surveillance (Lauer 2017). That tapestry might seem all-encompassing and seamless by now, even if it contains loose threads, loopholes, and islands of encryption. 

Histories of tracking are co-operative histories that involve the consent, non-consent and dissent of digital media usage (Jones 2024). They are also business histories that rely on what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) has aptly called a “behavioral surplus” of data––without properly historicizing its inception. Last but not least, histories of tracking are histories of its public scrutiny and accountability, from opposing civil rights movements to the political and legal controversies that make the case for regulation.

We thus invite dedicated contributions from Media and Cultural Studies, History, Science and Technology Studies, Surveillance Studies, Platform Studies, Code Studies, Socio-Informatics, Law, and Sociology that combine historiographic and empirical work with grounded theoretical approaches. Activist and artistic positions that rethink tracking and/in/as media environments are highly welcome!

Scientific committee

• Sebastian Giessmann
• Valérie Schafer
• Tatjana Seitz
• Anne Schreiber
• Inga Schuppener

Organisation

• C²DH – University of Luxembourg
• Universität Siegen

With the support of Collaborative Reseacg Centra 1187 Media of Cooperation, Siegen; project A01: Digital Network Technologies between Specialization and Generalization; C²DH, Université de Luxembourg; FNR, Luxembourg and DFG, Germany

References

Agre, Philip E. “Surveillance and Capture. Two Models of Privacy.” In theNewMediaReader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. MIT Press, 2003 [1994].

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3–7.

Jones, Meg Leta. The Character of Consent. The History of Cookies and the Future of Technology Policy. Information Policy. MIT Press, 2024.

Lauer, Josh. Creditworthy. A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America. Columbia University Press, 2017.

Schneier, Bruce. “The 600+ Companies PayPal Shares Your Data With - Schneier on Security.” Schneier on Security, March 14, 2018. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/the_600_compani.html.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2019.

Im Fokus der Tagung. „Sprache verbindet: Kooperative kommunikative Praktiken in Mediengesellschaften“ stehen alle Arten von sprachlich-kommunikativen Medienpraktiken (im weitesten Sinne), mit denen (mehr oder weniger) situationsgerecht Handelnde auf eine Ermöglichung von Kooperation und/oder nachhaltige Beförderung von Zusammenhalt hinarbeiten oder der Produktion gesellschaftlicher Differenzkategorien entgegenwirken. 

more information will come

Archive werden schon lange nicht mehr als neutrale Aufbewahrungsorte der Vergangenheit verstanden. Eine umfangreiche kritische Forschungsliteratur hat gezeigt, dass es sich bei ihnen um umkämpfte Infrastrukturen handelt, durch die Erinnerungen, Geschichten, Öffentlichkeiten und Machtverhältnisse geformt, ausgehandelt und ausgelöscht werden (Foucault 1972; Mbembe 2002; Stoler 2009). Dennoch befasst sich ein Großteil dieser Arbeiten nach wie vor in erster Linie mit dem Archiv als Ort der Bewahrung, der Steuerung, der Auseinandersetzung oder – in seiner gegenarchivischen Umkehrung – des Widerstands.

Anstatt diese Debatten erneut aufzugreifen, fragt dieser Workshop, wie sie aussehen, wenn man sie durch die Linse der Kooperation betrachtet. Wir verfolgen die fließenden Bewegungen und vielfältigen Anreize, durch die verschiedene Öffentlichkeiten Erinnerungen an vergangene Ereignisse mobilisieren, neu konstruieren, aufdecken, verbergen und zu löschen versuchen. Dieser Workshop richtet den Blick auf das Archivieren als fortlaufende Praxis der Zusammenarbeit, verstanden als die gemeinsame Erarbeitung der Mittel und Verfahren der Interaktion (Schüttpelz und Gießmann 2015). Er untersucht, wie und warum die Vergangenheit in der Gegenwart durch Medien, Infrastrukturen, Institutionen, Technologien und Umgebungen in Erinnerung bleibt und öffentlich gemacht wird; wie bestimmte Versionen davon zirkulieren und Autorität erlangen; und wie ihre Spuren bewahrt, transformiert, umstritten oder ausgelöscht werden. Aus dieser Perspektive wird das Archiv als eine Infrastruktur der Zusammenarbeit betrachtet, die auf verteilten, materiellen und vermittelten Praktiken der Erinnerungsarbeit beruht, durch die vergangene Ereignisse wahrnehmbar gemacht, Öffentlichkeiten gebildet und Zukünfte imaginiert werden.

Eine solche Herangehensweise an Archive verlagert den Fokus von dem, was Archive enthalten, hin zu den heterogenen Praktiken und Beziehungen, durch die sie zusammengestellt werden. Er rückt die kooperative Arbeit in den Vordergrund, die Erinnerungen, ihre Hüter sowie die materiellen und vermittelten Spuren, durch die sie fortbestehen, miteinander verbindet, und zeigt gleichzeitig auf, wie Erinnerungen produziert, stabilisiert, angefochten und transformiert werden, während verschiedene Öffentlichkeiten konkurrierende Versionen der Vergangenheit mobilisieren. Wie alle Formen der Zusammenarbeit können diese Prozesse ins Stocken geraten, ausgrenzen, fragmentieren oder zusammenbrechen.

Der Workshop fragt, welche Formen kooperativer Arbeit Archive entstehen lassen, sie zusammenhalten, sie transformieren oder ihren Zerfall zulassen. Er folgt archivarischen Spuren, während sie durch Landschaften, religiöse Netzwerke, Migrationsbewegungen, Museumssammlungen, künstlerische Praktiken, Verwaltungsunterlagen und digitale Plattformen zirkulieren. Wie werden ein koloniales Wasserversorgungssystem, eine militärische Ruine, eine Marienstatue, ein Museumsobjekt, eine Verwaltungsakte, ein alter Zugfahrplan oder eine Sensoraufzeichnung in neue Formen der Zusammenarbeit eingebunden, die Öffentlichkeiten zusammenführen und Bedeutungen jenseits ihres ursprünglichen Zwecks generieren?

Der Workshop bringt Susan Slyomovics’ Arbeit zu Erinnerung, Kulturerbe, Volksarchiven und postkolonialer Gerechtigkeit in Nordafrika und im Nahen Osten (Slyomovics 1998, 2005) in einen Dialog mit aktuellen Forschungsarbeiten im Rahmen des SFB „Media of Cooperation“, um Archive als Infrastrukturen der Zusammenarbeit zu untersuchen, durch die Erinnerungen, Öffentlichkeiten und mögliche Zukünfte kontinuierlich geschaffen und neu gestaltet werden.

Vorläufiges Programm:

Keynote-Vortrag

Susan Slyomovics (UCLA), Keynote-Vortrag; Diskutantin: Sevi Bayraktar (HfmtKöln)

Panel I: Bewahren: Die Arbeit, die Erinnerungen an die Vergangenheit zusammenhält

Wie wird die Vergangenheit durch Wiederholung, Weitergabe, Pflege und Fürsorge am Leben erhalten, und wer ist an dieser Arbeit beteiligt?

Carla Tiefenbacher (B04): Katholische Netzwerke, Voluntourismus, reisende Marienstatuen, Friedhöfe und transnationale katholische Erinnerung

P01 (Meyer/Mondada): Sinnesvermittlung, verkörperte Erinnerung und kooperative Praktiken der Weitergabe

Nina ter Laan (B04) Transnationaler Erinnerungsaktivismus und zeitgenössische Auseinandersetzungen mit den materiellen Überresten des Kolonialismus im Rif

Panel II: Aufbrechen und Wahrnehmen: Abwesenheiten, Lücken und gescheiterte Zusammenarbeit

Was geschieht, wenn die Zusammenarbeit im Archivbereich scheitert, und wie wird dies wahrgenommen und sinngebend interpretiert?

A04 (Potthast) Institutionelle Infrastrukturen, Instandhaltung und Zusammenbruch, öffentliche Verwaltung

P06 (Baraikyte) Kriegswahrnehmung, Dokumentation und Konfliktarchive

Martin Zillinger (B04) „Spukende“ Wasserinfrastrukturen, landwirtschaftlicher Modernismus und ökologische Nachwirkungen kolonialer und postkolonialer Entwicklung in Marokko

Panel III: Zukunftsgestaltung: Kollektive, Ansprüche und Wiedergutmachung vorstellen

Wie konstruieren Archivpraktiken Identität/Kollektive und entwerfen Zukunftsvisionen, unter anderem durch Restitution und historische Gerechtigkeit?

Birgit Meyer (Universität Utrecht): Religiöses Erbe, Vermittlung, Museen und Restitution

Anna Brus (Universität zu Köln): Museumssammlungen und Provenienzforschung

A01 (Gießmann): Historische Medieninfrastrukturen, vernetzte Archive und Archivpraktiken

Podiumsdiskussion

Abschließende Podiumsdiskussion mit allen Teilnehmenden, Reflexion über übergreifende Themen.

The 2026 annual conference of the Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation” explores the politics of cooperative sensing and sense-making in a time marked by geopolitical and climate catastrophes, anti-democratic backlashes and the rise of authoritarian regimes—all of which are phenomena closely intertwined with increasing datafication, generative AI developments, and the growing power of Big Tech. 

Around the world, we find ourselves confronted with these complex entanglements, whose environmental, political and societal costs are distributed unevenly. While digital technologies enable new forms of cooperation, their energy consumption also contributes to environmental disasters. At the same time, it is precisely these digital technologies and infrastructures that are increasingly becoming sites of violence, from algorithmic discrimination to gendered and racialized forms of harassment and disinformation. 

Against this backdrop, the annual conference examines how cooperation is being reshaped in today’s sociotechnical environments. It explores how various alliances—between states and Big Tech companies on the one hand, and between researchers, activists, artists, and communities on the other—negotiate the possibilities and limits of public action and perception. How do media and data practices contribute to new forms of control and how are they challenged via digital protests or anti-tech initiatives? And how can cooperative practices and protests also enable resistance and democratic engagement?

Bringing together scholars, activists, artists, filmmakers and journalists, the conference invites participants to inquire into the politics of media, data, and sensory practices, and to explore the role of cooperative forms of sensing and sense-making.

The conference is organized around three key thematic areas:

Area 1: Digital Power and Techfascism
In this section, we examine emerging alliances between governments, technology corporations, and far-right digital cultures. It focuses on current formations of violence and power: the cooperation between governments and Big Tech on the one hand, and the rise of the global far-right enabled by deregulated social networks on the other. Topics include digital violence, disinformation campaigns, the affective politics of online communities, techfascisms, and debates around digital sovereignty.

Area 2: Sensory Conflicts and Mediated Wars
This area explores how contemporary conflicts, from wars to geopolitical tensions, are experienced, mediated, and interpreted through digital technologies. It addresses major geopolitical and media-technological shifts, including the digitally mediated forms of witnessing wars and conflicts, as well as the fundamental expropriations of land, water, and resources underpinning digital media, which become visible through practices of extractivism, and the sensory confusion produced by disinformation and generative AI.

Area 3: Resistance, Cooperation and Democratic Practices
Alongside critical diagnoses discussed in the other two areas, this part of the program highlights practices of resistance and democratic engagement from activist research and digital anti-facist initiatives. The third section therefore explores interventions in the radicalization and fascistization of societies, how scholars and universities can act together with civil society to counter anti-democratic processes in which Big Tech and other corporations are actively implicated. 

As part of the annual conference, Prof. Dr. Erhard Schüttpelz will deliver his farewell lecture, which will include a laudatory address by Prof. Dr. Rembert Hüser. The farewell ceremony will be held in German.

More information coming soon.

more info coming soon.

If you want to particiapte at the workshop, please register via email to Akib Shahriar Khan.

more information coming soon

More information will follow soon