Community and/in Collaboration:
Exploring Cultural Mediation and Spatial Research

Please register by Dec 10 by writing an email to Nina ter Laan.

About the Masterclass

As Anthropology encounters a world increasingly shaped by mediated exchanges across diverse physical and cultural spaces, researchers are called to innovate methods that engage more dynamically with the communities they study and work with. This masterclass invites participants to explore how contemporary ethnographic practices can harness the potential of spatial analysis and transmedia work to deepen our understanding of social phenomena and better support community-driven processes. 

Our guiding question will be: How can we develop ethnographic methods that work in tandem with public audiences to build collective insights and promote social justice? In a two-day program, participants will examine the potential of ethnographic work that engages publics and stakeholders through different case studies, focusing on how cultural mediation and critical spatial practices can redefine research approaches. 

This masterclass combines conceptual discussions with hands-on activities, offering participants the time to explore tools that integrate diverse methodologies to enhance collaborative and participatory approaches to their projects. Some of the methods that will be presented and practiced include: social cartography, body mapping, sensorial ethnography, curatorial practice and cultural mediation, community archives and anarchivism, popular pedagogies, amongst others. No previous experience with the methods or the topics is required to participate fully in this masterclass.  

This masterclass will be imparted in English. 

Key topics include:

• Critical Mapping Practices
• Feminist Methodologies
• Transmedia Narratives
• Cultural Mediation and Curatorial Practices
• Spatial Justice and Social Change

Access: If you have questions of accessibility to this masterclass, please contact Luciana at luciana@espacial.coop. We will do our best to accommodate any needs. 

About Luciana Serrano

Luciana Serrano (b.1988, Buenos Aires) is a practice-based-researcher living in Argentina. Her expanded practice involves community-led research, interdisciplinary projects and cultural management with a focus on spatial justice. Her recent work explores critical spatial practices focusing on memory, identity and belonging connected to the material realm. These initiatives have been found of value in spaces such as popular education projects, academic conferences, human rights initiatives, art residencies, and policy design and evaluation. Luciana has been a guest lecturer in Argentina at Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Universidad Nacional de las Artes, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Profesorado Popular de Historia Osvaldo Bayer, and internationally in Universidad de la República, Leeds University, School for International Training, amongst others. Luciana also was a 2023 Fellow at the  Institute for Critical Social Inquiry at the New School, and participated in art residencies in Brazil, Chile and Argentina. Her consultancy work, commissions, publications and collaborations include projects with Virginia Tech University, the National Ministry of Culture of Argentina, Tierra Narrative Collective, Arena Documenta, FAN digital magazine (Fantasías Arquitectónicas Nerviosas), Centro Cultural Kirchner, World Learning, the Direction of Creative Industries of the City of Buenos Aires, Embassy of France in Argentina, Contested Territories, Nuevo Oro magazine, Bienal Arte Joven Buenos Aires, and Curatoría Forense. She has been the editor of PURGA magazine, a member of Ciudad del Deseo feminist urbanism collective, and is currently the President of the Cooperativa Espacial work coop. Luciana’s training includes a background in Socio-Cultural Anthropology, Experiential Learning, and Transmedia Narratives. 

More info:

luserrano.com

espacial.coop

Mit dem Bundle Explorer Sinnespraktiken in digitalen Kindheiten untersuchen.

mit Bina E. Mohn (Zentrum für Kamera-Ethnographie, Berlin) und Astrid Vogelpohl (Uni Siegen, SFB „Medien der Kooperation“)

Anmeldungen bitte bis zum 06.12.2024 an Astrid Vogelpohl.

Zum Blicklabor „Berührung“

Der Bundle Explorer ist eine von Bina E. Mohn und Astrid Vogelpohl entwickelte multimediale Forschungsplattform, die im Rahmen einer Orientierung der Kamera-Ethnographie an Wittgenstein entstanden ist, an seinem Sprachspiel Ansatz (grammatische Untersuchung) und der Abwandlung in eine ‚zeigende Grammatik‘. Mit dem Bundle Explorer lässt sich an kurzen Filmen untersuchen, wie Praktiken mit Praktiken gebündelt auftreten und wie ihre Umgebungen und materiellen Settings daran partizipieren. Die Identifizierung der Bündel, in die Praktiken verwoben sind, eröffnet einen Zugang zur jeweiligen Situierung; das Spektrum an Situierungen wiederum bietet die Basis für eine praxeologische Konturierung von ‚Berührung‘ als Praxis und Begriff. Auf selbstgewählten Wegen durch den Explorer ergeben sich Vergleiche, Unterscheidungen und Zuordnungen, schließlich auch Kategorien, Überschneidungen und Grenzfälle.

Der Prototyp „Bundle Explorer: Berührung“ untersucht Berührungspraktiken im Feld der frühen Kindheit und eröffnet darüber ein neues Verständnis situierter Sinnespraktiken in digitalisierten Alltagswelten. Im Umgang mit dem  „Bundle Explorer“ werden  im Rahmen des eintägigen Workshops Erkundungspfade und Denkwege erprobt und diskutiert.

Die Veranstaltung wendet sich an Promovierende, Postdocs und Forschende aus den Medien-und Erziehungswissenschaften, Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften.

Diskutant*innen:

Birgit Griesecke (Japanologin und Philosophin, Schwerpunkt Philosophie Wittgensteins, Berlin)

Klaus Amann (Wissenschaftssoziologe und Bildungsberater, Schwerpunkt Methodenentwicklung, Dörsdorf)

Jochen Lange (Erziehungswissenschaftler, Schwerpunkt Digitalisierung, Materialität und Medialität in Kindheit und Schule, Uni Siegen, SFB ‚Medien der Kooperation‘)

Programm

09:30 – 11:00                   Präsentation: Bundle Explorer ‚Berührung‘

11:00 – 11:15                   Kaffeepause

11:15 – 12:30                   Werkstattphase: Erprobung von Wegen durch den Bundle Explorer und Formulierung eigener Beobachtungen und Gedanken

12:30 – 13:30                   Mittagspause

13:30 – 14:30                   Austausch der Erfahrungen mit dem Bundle Explorer ‚Berührung‘

14:30 –15:00                     Feedback zu Ansatz und Umsetzung des ‚Bundle Explorer‘

• 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.

Surveillance technologies have grown increasingly into the very fabric of urban landscape across the globe. Sometimes these go unnoticed, sometimes they are veiled under the pretence of smart city developments that render the deep embedding of sensory technology into our immediate surroundings a false declared beacon of progress and interconnected life. Forensis and Forensic Architecture develop methods to critically scrutinise the violence of state, corporate and environmental actors. Using a wide array of digital tools and spatial reconstruction techniques we have turned our investigations towards surveillance technologies, documenting their abuse and embedding in regimes of occupational, colonial and state violence. The lecture and workshop will show both case specific examples of counter-surveillance work as well as illustrate the ways through which open-source investigative techniques, testimonial work, and spatial research methods can intersect to document, counter and resist ever more present surveillance.

About the lecturer

Tobechukwu Onwukeme. In May 2022, Tobechukwu Onwukeme received his Bachelor of Science(B.Sc) from the University of Utah’s Multi-Disciplinary Design School, where his undergraduate thesis proposed the confluence of computational, architectural, and material design tools in response to environmental violence against migratory wildlife in the Americas, Eastern Europe, and West Africa. The project won the program’s thesis prize. Prior to joining Forensis he worked at various labs and agencies as a design technologist where he designed and developed applications for computer vision, sensors, ML, data sonification, and material fabrication.

Jasper Julius Humpert is a multidisciplinary researcher and artist. At FA and Forensis, Jasper works in the editorial and investigative teams across various topics. Focusing on the interpretation of the overlap of the written and the seen, his research revolves around the investigation of state brutality, extrajudicial violence and regimes of environmental destruction. Jasper received an MSc at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford, and completed his studies in Philosophy, Journalism and Visual Anthropology in universities of Maastricht, Netherlands, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and London, United Kingdom. Prior to his work at FA, Jasper worked as a researcher and political organiser and activist in The Hague, Berlin and Rio de Janeiro.

About Forensic Architecture

Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. Our mandate is to develop, employ, and disseminate new techniques, methods, and concepts for investigating state and corporate violence. Our team includes architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists, and lawyers.

We are an interdisciplinary agency operating across human rights, journalism, architecture, art and aesthetics, academia and the law. In 2022, the Peabody Awards programme wrote that we had co-created ‘an entire new academic field and emergent media practice’; in 2024, the European Research Council assessed Forensic Architecture as ‘a scientific breakthrough (defined as a revolutionary work that led to deep change in existing paradigms or new methods opening a new stream of research)’.

Since 2020, FA has supported the growth of agencies worldwide that practice and apply our methods. The Investigative Commons is both a global network of practitioners, and a physical space in Berlin, within the offices of our sister agency Forensis.

All events take place in hybrid form (on site and via Webex). If you would like to attend on site, no registration is required. To attend the lecture online via Webex, please register here.

About the lecture series

more info tba

Social media platforms have been thriving for the past decade. Their main business models have been relying on advertising in the form of getting paid by companies – and any other interested party – to display ads in the feeds of their users. Traditionally, such ads have been mimicking the clear demarcation of advertising from the content of radio and television programmes. Decades of media regulation led to a status quo where advertising needs to be very clearly disclosed, in order to preserve the consumer’s agency and freedom of decision-making, and avoid manipulation. Yet with the rise of user-generated advertising in the form of influencer marketing, this demarcation has been not only increasingly lost, but also very much challenged. Viral videos of creators engaging in enticing story-telling can feature product placements, promote own brands of goods or services, or offer discounts through affiliate marketing. The general perception by creators is that disclosing their sponsored content can be detrimental for their reach, and thus even when they may be aware of their legal obligations, they generally choose to not comply with the law. The Digital Services Act introduced a new set of obligations for platforms that are deemed to have such a high impact on consumers that they received their own extra liabilities (Very Large Online Platforms – VLOPs). According to Art. 34 DSA, VLOPs must identify systemic risks and take mitigation strategies against them. The DSA does not define systemic risks, but it includes the dissemination of illegal content in this category. Hidden advertising is a form of illegal content, as it violates disclosure obligations under EU and national advertising rules pertaining to consumer protection. This contribution makes the argument that hidden advertising can be considered a systemic risk, first by reporting on the empirical evidence from computer science literature on the meager volume of influencer disclosures on social media, and second by addressing the impact of such non-disclosures under the DSA. In doing so, the contribution also asks whether disclosures are still relevant for social media advertising given the changing preferences and information literacy of new generations of consumers such as gen z.

About the lecturer

Dr. Catalina Goanta is Associate Professor in Private Law and Technology and Principal Investigator of the ERC Starting Grant HUMANads, focused on understanding the impact of content monetization on social media and on reinterpreting private law fairness in the context of platform governance.

Between 2016-2021 she was Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Law at Maastricht University, and during February 2018 – February 2019, she was granted a Niels Stensen fellowship and visited the University of St. Gallen (The Institute of Work and Employment) and Harvard University (The Berkman Center for Internet and Society). Dr. Goanta is also an expert trainer in the European Commission’s E-Enforcement Academy, where she gives trainings on computational investigations of European consumer protection violations on digital markets. In this context, she also co-developed the first European influencer education resource on consumer protection and social media advertising, the Influencer Legal Hub.

All events take place in hybrid form (on site and via Webex). If you would like to attend on site, no registration is required. To attend the lecture online via Webex, please register here.

About the lecture series

• 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.

Between 1960 and 1966, the French colonial regime detonated four atmospheric atomic bombs, thirteen underground nuclear bombs, and conducted other nuclear experiments in the Algerian Sahara, whose natural resources were being extracted in the process. This secret nuclear weapons program, whose archives are still classified, occurred during and after the Algerian Revolution, or the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62). This lecture introduces three media through which these histories and stories have been exposed: a series of translations, a traveling exhibtion and a book. Titled Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara, this printed manuscript brings together nearly six hundred pages of materials documenting this violent history of France’s nuclear bomb programme in the Algerian desert. Meticulously culled together from across available, offered, contraband, and leaked sources, the book is a rich repository for all those concerned with histories of nuclear weapons and engaged at the intersections of spatial, social and environmental justice, as well as anticolonial archival practices.

About the lecturer

Samia Henni is a historian of the built, destroyed and imagined environments. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Architecture of Counterrevolution: The French Army in Northern Algeria (gta Verlag 2017, 2022, EN; Editions B42, 2019, FR) and Colonial Toxicity: Rehearsing French Radioactive Architecture and Landscape in the Sahara (If I Can’t Dance, Framer Framed, edition fink, 2024). She is the editor of Deserts Are Not Empty (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022) and War Zones (gta Verlag, 2018). She is also the maker of exhibitions, such as Performing Colonial Toxicity (Framer Framed, If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam; gta Exhibitions, Zurich; The Mosaic Rooms, London, 2023–04), Discreet Violence: Architecture and the French War in Algeria (Zurich, Rotterdam, Berlin, Johannesburg, Paris, Prague, Ithaca, Philadelphia, Charlottesville, 2017–22), Archives: Secret-Défense? (ifa Gallery, SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin, 2021), and Housing Pharmacology (Manifesta 13, Marseille, 2020). Currently, she teaches at McGill University’s Peter Guo-hua Fu School of Architecture in Montreal and co-chairs the University Seminar “Beyond France” at Columbia University.

All events take place in hybrid form (on site and via Webex). If you would like to attend on site, no registration is required. To attend the lecture online via Webex, please register here.

About the lecture series

The Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation” organizes the one-week winter school at the University of Siegen and invites graduate students, postdoc researchers, and media studies scholars interested in the intersections of AI methods, digital visual methodologies, visual social media, and platforms. The Winter School aims to explore questions centering on the implications of AI methods for new forms of sense-making and human-machine co-creation. Please register via the registration form until December 15 2025 →here.

About the Winter School

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies rapidly evolve, the ways in which we perceive and process information are fundamentally changing. The shift from computational vision, recognition, and classification to generative AI lies at the core of today’s technological landscape, fueling societal debates across different areas—from open-source intelligence and election security to propaganda, art, activism, and storytelling. 

Computer vision, a sophisticated agent of pattern recognition, emerged with the rise of machine learning, sparking critical debates around the fairness of image labelling and the deep-seated biases in training data. Today, models like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, and more recently, Grok are not just recognizing—they are generating patterns, synthesizing multimodal data from websites, social media, and other online sources to produce oddly familiar and yet captivating results. This shift introduces significant ethical questions: How can we critically repurpose the outputs of AI models that are always rooted in platform infrastructures? Which methodological challenges and creative possibilities arise when the boundaries between context and scale become indistinct? Are patterns and biases all there is? And how about scaling down? 

The one-week winter school at the University of Siegen organized by the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” invites participants to explore these questions centering on the implications of AI methods for new forms of sense-making and human-machine co-creation. The winter school is practice-based and brings together conceptual inputs, workshops, and sprinted group projects around two collaborative methods: probing and prompting. 

Probing involves repurposing AI systems to explore their underlying mechanisms. It is a method of critical interrogation—for example, using specific collections of images as inputs to reveal how contemporary computer vision models process these inputs and generate descriptions. Probing not only serves to problematize the hidden architectures of AI but also allows us to critically assess their different ‘ways of knowing’—how can alternative computer vision features such as web detection or text-in-image recognition help us contextualize and interpret visual data? 

On the other hand, prompting refers to the practice of engaging GenAI models through input commands to generate multimodal content. Prompting emphasizes the participatory aspect of AI, framing it as a tool for human-machine co-creation, but it also shows the models’ limitations and inherent tensions. AI-generated creations captivate us, yet they also pose the risk of hallucination or what philosopher Harry Frankfurt might call “bullshit”— statements the models confidently present as facts, regardless of their detachment from reality.

The first day of the Winter School will be hybrid. Project group work will be taking place on site.

Program highlights

Participants will have the opportunity to explore and attune these methods to different research scenarios including tracing the spread of propaganda memes/deepfakes, analyzing AI-generated images, and ‘jailbreaking’ or prompting against platforms’ content policy restrictions. A blend of research practice and critical reflection, the winter school features

a keynote by Jill Walker Rettberg (University of Bergen) on “Qualitiative methods for analysing generative AI: Experiences with machine vision and AI storytelling”

two hands-on workshops on mixed techniques for probing and prompting facilitated by Carlo de Gaetano (Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences), Andrea Benedetti (Density Design, Politecnico di Milano), Elena Pilipets (University of Siegen), and Marloes Geboers (University of Amsterdam) 

two project tracks intended to combine AI methods with qualitative approaches and ethical data storytelling.

Track 1 “Fabricating the People: Probing AI Detection for Audio-Visual Content in Turkish TikTok” led by Lena Teigeler and Duygu Karatas (both University of Siegen)

Track 2 “Jail(break)ing: Synthetic Imaginaries of ‘sensitive’ AI” led by Elena Pilipets (University of Siegen) and Marloes Geboers (University of Amsterdam)

Track I: Fabricating the People: Probing AI Detection for Audio-Visual Content in Turkish TikTok

Lena Teigeler & Duygu Karatas

Several brutal femicides in Türkiye in 2024 led to a wave of outrage, showing in protests both on the streets and on social media. The protesters demand the protection of women against male violence, measures against offenders and criticize the government under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for not standing up for women’s rights, as demonstrated, for example, by Türkiye’s withdrawal from the Istanbul Convention in 2021. One of the cases leading to the protest was allegedly connected to the Turkish “manosphere” and online “incel” community. The manosphere is an informal online network of blogs, forums, and social media communities focused on men’s issues, often promoting views on masculinity, gender roles, and relationships. At the core of these groups often lie misogynistic, and anti-feminist views. Many groups foster toxic attitudes toward women and marginalized groups. Incels, short for „involuntary celibates,“ are one subgroup belonging to the broader manosphere, formed by men who feel unable to form romantic or sexual relationships despite wanting them, often blaming society or women for their frustrations.

The project investigates how the cases of femicide are discussed and negotiated in Turkish TikTok by protesters and within the manosphere and explores how these videos make use of generative AI. The use of AI in video creation can range from entire scene generation, over the creation of sounds or deepfaking, to editing and stylisation. The project takes a sample of TikToks associated with the recent wave of femicides as the starting point and makes use of AI methods for two purposes: 1) To detect the usage of generative AI within a sample of TikToks with the help of image labeling. This can range from fully-generated images, videos or sound, to the usage of tools and techniques used within the creation and editing process. We compare different models for detection purposes. 2) With the help of Web Detection, we trace the spread of videos and images across platform borders and content elements that are assembled or synthesized within TikToks.

The aim of the project is to create a cartography of AI based methods for the investigation of audio-visual content. It is part of the DFG-funded research project “Fabricating the People – negotiation of claims to representation in Turkish social media in the context of generative AI”.

Track II: Track 2 Jail(break)ing: Synthetic Imaginaries of ’sensitive‘ AI 

Elena Pilipets & Marloes Geboers 

The rapid evolution of AI technology is pushing the boundaries of ethical AI use. Newer models like Grok-2 diverge from traditional, more restrained approaches, raising concerns about biases, moderation, and societal impact. This track explores how three generative AI models—X’s Grok-2, Open AI’s GPT4o, and Microsoft’s Copilot—reimagine controversial content according to—or pushing against—the platforms‘ content policy restrictions. To better understand each model’s response to sensitive prompts, we use a derivative approach: starting with images as inputs, we generate stories around them that guide the creation of new, story-based image outputs. In the process, we employ iterative prompting that blends “jailbreaking”—eliciting responses the model would typically avoid—with “jailing,” or reinforcing platform-imposed constraints. Jail(break)ing, then, exposes the skewed imaginaries inscribed in the models‘ capacity to synthesize compliant outputs: The more iterations it takes to generate a new image the stronger the latent spaces of generative models come to the fore that lay bare the platforms‘ data-informed structures of reasoning.

Addressing the performative nature of automated perception, the track, facilitated by Elena Pilipets and Marloes Geboers, examines six image formations collected from social media, which then were used as prompts to explore six issues: war, memes, art, protest, porn, synthetics. In line with feminist approaches, we attend specifically to the hierarchies of power and (in)visibility perpetuated by GenAI, asking: Which synthetic imaginaries emerge from various issue contexts and what do these imaginaries reveal about the model’s ways

Registration

Please register via the form above until December 15. Your registration will be confirmed by December 20, 2024. Participation is limited to 20 people.