lead by Dr. Annette Klinkert (city2science)

Part #1: Start the Dialogue, Open Up Science! – Introduction to Science Communication and Public Engagement

About the Science Communication & Public Engagement Series #1-4

Building on and expanding discussions of the value of anonymity and pseudonymity in digital cultures in general, and in queer digital cultures in particular, this presentation explores notions of opacity as modes of resistance to dominating regimes of visibility on and beyond social media platforms. Across queer, postcolonial and digital media theorizing, opacity provides a way of thinking through the tension between the visible and the invisible, challenging the idea of public visibility and identification as that which drives data cultures and legitimizes marginalized sexual practices and expressions. Suggestive of discussions on tactical, queer uses of social media in terms of disconnection and reluctance, opacity affords yet another way of thinking resistance to platform power and user control.

Based on an ethnographic study of the Swedish digital BDSM, fetish and kink platform Darkside, this presentation discusses opacity in two ways: first, as a way of considering tactical uses of Darkside between modes of revealing and concealing, and second, as a way of conceptualizing the platform as a borderland between intelligibility and unintelligibility. The platform provides an opening for shared vulnerabilities and collective forms of secrecy reminiscent of what Clare Birchall (2021) calls “radical secrecy,” which in the context of Darkside grants both privacy and degrees of public kink visibility to its members. Birchall imagines radical secrecy – or “postsecrecy” – as a mode of collective resistance to both neoliberal transparency and secret state surveillance in datafied societies.

Opacity implies a lack of clarity; something opaque may be both difficult to see clearly as well as to understand. Drawing on Édouard Glissant (1997) and his idea of “the right to opacity” as a form of resistance to surveillance and imperial domination, a digital sexual politics of opacity could help provide recognition without a demand to fully understand sexual otherness, opening up for new modes of obscure and pleasurable sexual expressions and transgressions on social media platforms.

Jenny Sundén is Professor of Gender Studies at Södertörn University and a Guest Professor in Gender Studies, Uppsala University in Sweden. She has been a Visiting Scholar at University of California at Berkeley; University of Surrey; Peking University, Beijing; Hunter College (CUNY), New York City; and University of Turku. She currently focuses on digital sexual cultures, sextech, audio erotica, and the politics of pleasure. She is the PI of the research projects “Digital sexual health: Designing for safety, pleasure and wellbeing in LGBTQ+ communities” funded by Forte: Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (with Kath Albury and Zahra Stardust) and “Listening pleasures: Sexual health and audio fiction in a time of digital intimacy” funded by The Swedish Research Council (with Anna Hultman, Sara Tanderup Linkis and Linn Sandberg). She is the author of Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment (Peter Lang, 2003), Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play (with Malin Sveningsson, Routledge 2012,) Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (with Susanna Paasonen, MIT Press 2020) and Hot connections: Why sexual platforms matter (with Susanna Paasonen and Katrin Tiidenberg, MIT Press forthcoming 2026).

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

Das Teilprojekt B05 „(Frühe) Kindheit und Smartphone“ lädt zu einem neuen Format ein, bei dem aktuelle Filme aus der laufenden Forschung des Projekts mit Textfragmenten aus Merleau-Pontys Klassiker „Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung“ zusammen betrachtet werden. Gemeinsam mit dem Mercator Fellow Jürgen Streeck werden die gezeigten Filmausschnitte und die phänomenologische Perspektive aufeinander bezogen.

Bitte melden Sie sich für die betreffende Veranstaltung an. Links zu den Filmen und Textauszügen werden eine Woche vor der Veranstaltung verschickt. Anmeldung bei Maria Espinosa Treiber unter: maria.etreiber[at]student.uni-siegen.de

To register for the masterclass please send an email to the coordination.

Resolution Studies attempts to uncover how resolutions inform both machine vision and human perception. I believe it is incredibly important to unpack the ways in which resolutions organize our contemporary (technological) processes. Considering that resolutions do not only impose how or what gets run or seen, but also what images, settings, ways of rendering and points of view are forgotten, obfuscated, or simply dismissed or unsupported. In short: resolutions are not just a determination of how something or someone is run, read and seen, but also of who or what options are compromised and unresolved. 

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and researcher of resolutions. Her work focuses on noise artifacts resulting from accidents in both analog and digital media.

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

• Antrag auf Assoziierung
• Antrag auf Förderung einer Publikation
• Antrag auf Förderung einer Veranstaltung

Die Vorstandssitzungen enthalten Berichte, Themenpunkte und Verschiedenes, die für alle SFB Mitglieder öffentlich sind. Personenbezogene Anträge und Finanzen sind nicht öffentlich und werden nach dem öffentlichen Teil besprochen. Webex-Links für Online-Teilnahmen werden am vorherigen Freitag verschickt. Teilnahme vor Ort ist möglich.

Digitale Protokolle des öffentlichen Teils werden über sciebo zur Verfügung gestellt.

Experimental media artists are always entangled with the medium-specific materials they work with. They typically have to traverse and synthesise multiple mediated scales at once to repurpose or defamiliarise objects in order to make them speak, whether these scales be from voltages to music, bits to words, or pixels to perspectives. In this sense, media artists are engaged in capturing a material that in turn captures them, and ultimately captures the subjects the constructed artwork aims to address. An artwork is thus a site of ‘reciprocal capture’, to use a term from Isabelle Stengers, in that it undoes strict subject/object dichotomies. This is how artworks can be said to defamiliarise objects and give them a ‘voice.’ And it is not just objects that are defamiliarised but the ‘familiar subjects’ as well. So beyond being simply a savoir-faire, artwork making is a creative act that problematises and dramatises the familiar by shifting the attention and focus of our familiar questions/answers (e.g. Who/ what/ when/ where/ why/ how is our infrastructure? Who/ what/ when/ where/ why/ how are our mediated identities?, etc.).  

In this lecture, I will unstitch this way of dramatising ‘problems’ from how such dramatisation is articulated in certain spheres of academia: with empirical methods. In the field of (digital) Media and Cultural studies, there are many connections that could be drawn with the way I qualified what experimental media artists do and what methods supposedly do as well. Making an object speak is also a concern of method. That being said, the fragile and brittle ways in which ‘reciprocal capture’ is sustained in artistic practices are seamlessly re-captured by the (inter)disciplinary narratives that methods help articulate. Within these (inter)disciplinary narratives, methods harbour questions of legitimacy, which is to say they give these narratives abilities to disqualify works that do not fall within certain boundaries. Therefore, rather than collapsing the familiar distance between subject and object, methods’ mode of dramatisation reify a certain subject position that reinstates distances. 

One is thus entitled to ask: Who are the (distant) subjects methods create? Who decides when a method is a method? Taking stock of my own trajectory as an artist and academic, I will address these questions with some of my work and question the ‘methodological turn’ in my field, one that, I will argue, produces what Jean-François Lyotard calls ‘differends.’ Bio Dr. 

David Gauthier is Assistant Professor of Computational Media and Arts in the Media and Culture Studies department at Utrecht University. With a background in Mathematics, Media Arts and Sciences, and Cultural Analysis, Gauthier’s work fosters original means of studying objects and phenomena by making transdisciplinary connections between different modes of inquiry stemming from these cultural and scientific traditions. Influential to his scholarly work, Gauthier is also a practicing media artist. Through the production of artworks which have been commissioned by art institutions across Europe and North America, his engagement with computation spans cultural production and active participation in various cultural networks.  https://www.uu.nl/sta/dgauthier/ https://davidgauthier.info/

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

In their new book, Data Grab, Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry argue that the role of data in society needs to be grasped as not only a development of capitalism, but as the start of a new phase in human history that rivals in importance the emergence of historic colonialism. This new form of ‘data colonialism’ gives shape to a social order based not on the extraction of natural resources or labor, but on the appropriation of human life through data. Resisting it will require strategies that decolonial thinking has foregrounded for decades.

Ulises A. Mejias is Professor of Communication Studies at the State University of New York at Oswego, recipient of the 2023 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship, and a Fulbright Specialist from 2021 to 2025. He is the author of Off the Network (University of Minnesota Press 2013) and, with Nick Couldry, of The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism (Stanford University Press 2019). He serves on the boards of Humanities New York (a National Endowment for the Humanities affiliate) and of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law.

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

Call for Papers

lead by Dr. Annette Klinkert (city2science)

Part #2: Open Science and Open Innovation in Science Communication

About the Science Communication & Public Engagement Series #1-4

• Antrag auf Assoziierung
• Antrag auf Förderung einer Publikation
• Antrag auf Förderung einer Veranstaltung

Die Vorstandssitzungen enthalten Berichte, Themenpunkte und Verschiedenes, die für alle SFB Mitglieder öffentlich sind. Personenbezogene Anträge und Finanzen sind nicht öffentlich und werden nach dem öffentlichen Teil besprochen. Webex-Links für Online-Teilnahmen werden am vorherigen Freitag verschickt. Teilnahme vor Ort ist möglich.

Digitale Protokolle des öffentlichen Teils werden über sciebo zur Verfügung gestellt.

Dr. Judith Rommel beschäftigt sich seit mehre­ren Jahren aktiv mit dem Thema Neuro­diver­sität. Aktuell ist sie an der Dualen Hoch­schule Baden-Württem­berg (DHBW) in Stutt­gart tätig. Sie ist zudem Grün­derin und 1. Vorsitzende des BZND Zentrum für Neurodiversität e. V.. Im Rahmen ihres Vor­trages wird sie über unter­schied­liche Neuro­diver­genzen und die damit verbun­denen kommuni­kativen Heraus­forde­rungen sowie die posi­tiven Aspekte ins­beson­dere im Hoch­schul­kontext infor­mieren und Gelegen­heit zum Aus­tausch und der Diskus­sion anhand von Fall­bei­spielen geben. Zudem wird sie einen Ein­blick in das Social Innovation Projekt Lilevi geben, das vom BZND e. V. getragen wird.

Über die Veranstaltungsreihe
Die Reihe „Diversity Lunch“ ist eine Kooperation der SFBs „Medien der Kooperation“ und „Trans­forma­tionen des Popu­lären“ und lädt alle Mit­glieder und Interes­sierten zu einem Austausch zu aktuellen Themen und Frage­stellungen rund um Diver­sität in der Wissen­schaft ein.

Eine Teilnahme ist online als auch in Präsenz im Herren­garten möglich. Im Anschluss an die Ver­anstal­tung laden wir herz­lich zu einem kleinen Imbiss/Lunch im Herren­garten (AH.A 208/209) ein!

Kontakt & Anmeldung: Dr. Raphaela Knipp

“…then there are of course times when there are problems that can be resolved simply by turning something off and on again, or problems that suddenly resolve themselves within the next two days, for which no one really knows the reason, and then you hear nothing about it anymore.” [Interview 11:425]

This trained agricultural mechanic and precision agriculture specialist describes his experience in the repair of digital agricultural machinery. He describes a glitch, a shaky moment of malfunction, of self-questioning, that is quickly followed by business-as-usual. Taking such elusive and mundane experiences of glitch further,  glitch art, glitch feminism and even glitch epistemologies have mobilized the glitch to point at other issues. Glitch art is “about relaying the membrane of the normal, to create a new protocol after shattering an earlier one.” (Menkman 2011, 341). The curator and writer Legacy Russel coined the term glitch feminism, calling for interventions that challenge gender binaries (Russell 2020). Glitches have been understood as signals of discriminatory orderings and mobilized to “illuminate the ways that race and technology intersect in pernicious ways” (Broussard 2024, 4). Therefore, glitch epistemologies have been proposed as ways of knowing computational cities (Leszczynski and Elwood 2022).

But what can thinking with and through the glitch offer to research on digital agriculture?  What are the potentials and limits? What can be seen through the glitch and what not? Can glitches be a starting point to identify further questions for digital agriculture? Building on ethnographic work on practices of repair in digital agriculture, this talk will explore glitchy vignettes from agricultural repair shops.

Alina Gombert studied Sustainable Agriculture (B.Sc.) and Crop Sciences (M.Sc.) in Kleve, Bonn and Lyon. As an agricultural scientist, she worked from 2018 to 2023 at the Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants (Julius Kühn-Institut) and the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL). In her current work she is looking for bridges between the arts and the rural, between the agricultural sciences and the social sciences and between agriculture and feminism. As a part of the //KOMPOST ensemble, she explores emancipatory ruralities in northern Hesse. She is excited by the transdisciplinary perspectives opened up by Science and Technology Studies.

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

lead by Dr. Annika Kreikenbohm (city2science)

Part #3: Communication Strategies and Pathways to Impact

About the Science Communication & Public Engagement Series #1-4

more information coming soon

Als Blicklabore bezeichnet die Kamera-Ethnographie Zusammentreffen, mit dem Ziel, „Blicke als Blicke zu reflektieren und in konkrete Forschungs­zusammenhängen damit zu experimentieren “ (Mohn 2023, S. 198).  Als Gäste werden Jürgen Streeck und Bina E. Mohn erwartet. Genauere Infos folgen.

Das Teilprojekt B05 „(Frühe) Kindheit und Smartphone“ lädt zu einem neuen Format ein, bei dem aktuelle Filme aus der laufenden Forschung des Projekts mit Textfragmenten aus Merleau-Pontys Klassiker „Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung“ zusammen betrachtet werden. Gemeinsam mit dem Mercator Fellow Jürgen Streeck werden die gezeigten Filmausschnitte und die phänomenologische Perspektive aufeinander bezogen.

Bitte melden Sie sich für die betreffende Veranstaltung an. Links zu den Filmen und Textauszügen werden eine Woche vor der Veranstaltung verschickt. Anmeldung bei Maria Espinosa Treiber unter: maria.etreiber[at]student.uni-siegen.de

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

lead by Dr. Verena Molitor (city2science)

Part #4: Stakeholder Engagement and Engagement Formats

About the Science Communication & Public Engagement Series #1-4

more information coming soon

• Antrag auf Assoziierung
• Antrag auf Förderung einer Publikation
• Antrag auf Förderung einer Veranstaltung

Die Vorstandssitzungen enthalten Berichte, Themenpunkte und Verschiedenes, die für alle SFB Mitglieder öffentlich sind. Personenbezogene Anträge und Finanzen sind nicht öffentlich und werden nach dem öffentlichen Teil besprochen. Webex-Links für Online-Teilnahmen werden am vorherigen Freitag verschickt. Teilnahme vor Ort ist möglich.

Digitale Protokolle des öffentlichen Teils werden über sciebo zur Verfügung gestellt.

This talk will advocate for decomputing as a means to unstitch the shroud of AI which is being draped over our collective futures. It will identify scale as the core logic of contemporary datafication, and the total mobilisation of human and natural resources as its authoritarian consequence. The seams of AI are already visible in its shoddy emulations and violent preemptions, and what peers back through the gaps are forms of eugenic solutionism.

Decomputing acknowledges that even the tokenistic restraints of the liberal rules-based order and its regulatory frameworks have little traction in the current moment. It draws instead on concepts from degrowth and systemic transformation to challenge the inevitability of AI’s accelerationism. Decomputing seeks to apply the intentional seamfulness of conviviality through mechanisms such as the matrix of convivial technology, while recognising that this will require the counter-power of collectively organised resistance. 

Decomputing is an assembly point for all those drawn into conflict with AI’s technopolitics, such as environmental, feminist and decolonical social movements. In particular, it seeks to develop situated forms of social decision-making that disable future attempts at a computationally-assisted coup d’etat.

Dan McQuillan is a Lecturer in Creative and Social Computing. He has a degree in Physics from Oxford and a PhD in Experimental Particle Physics from Imperial College, London. After his PhD he was a support worker for people with learning disabilities and volunteered as a mental health advocate, informing people in psychiatric detention about their rights. In the early days of the world wide web, he started a pioneering website to provide translated information for asylum seekers and refugees. When open source hardware sensors started appearing he co-founded a citizen science project in Kosovo, supporting politically excluded young people to measure pollution levels and get the issue of air quality onto their national agenda. After a stint working in the NHS he joined Amnesty International and created their first digital directorate. Dan has been involved in many grassroots social movements such as the campaign against the Poll Tax in the UK, and in environmental activism. He was part of the international movement in Genoa in 2001 which was protesting against the G8 and calling for an alternative globalisation that included justice for both people and planet. During the first wave of Covid-19 he helped to start a local mutual aid group where he lives in North London. Dan recently authored Resisting AI—An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence.

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

More information coming soon.

More information coming soon.

The Collaborative Research Centers “Media of Cooperation” and “Transformations of the Popular” in Siegen together with the Digital Culture and Communication Section of ECREA and the Center for Digital Narrative (University of Bergen) call for participation in the five-day event „Synthetic Imaginaries: The Politics of (In)Visibility in GenAI“. 

more information coming soon

Wie wird man Professorin und meistert den Spagat zwischen Beruf & Familie?

Bei diesem Vortrag mit anschließender Q&A haben Nachwuchswissenschaftlerinnen die Möglichkeit, Professorin Beatrice Schuchardt von der Universität Regensburg Fragen rund um das Thema „Wissenschaftliche Karriere“ und „Wissenschaftliche Karriere mit Kind(ern)“ zu stellen.

Beatrice Schuchardt wurde letztes Jahr auf eine W3-Professur für Spanische und Französische Kultur- und Literaturwissenschaft an der Universität Regensburg berufen. Zuvor war sie wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Romanischen Seminar der Universität Siegen.

Die Veranstaltung richtet sich an Wissenschaftlerinnen aller Karrierephase und ist ein Angebot von FraMeS – Frauenspezifisches Mentoring Siegen in Kooperation mit dem SFB 1187 „Medien der Kooperation“ und dem SFB 1472 „Transformationen des Populären“.