Kamera-Ethnographie trifft Seth Gidding. Lese-, Sichtungs- und Gesprächsformat (Online)

Projekt B05 „(Frühe) Kindheit und Smartphone“ (Jutta Wiesemann, Astrid Vogelpohl und Hoa Mai Trần) mit Mercator-Fellow Jürgen Streeck (University of Texas, Austin)

Montag, 18.5.2026, 16:00 – 18:00 Uhr, Sprache: deutsch

„There would be nothing fundamentally new or unfamiliar about the population of children’stoys, games, and literature“ (Giddings 2024, S. 1)

In „Toy Theory“ (2024) verfolgt Seth Giddings die Geschichte von Spielzeugen zurück bis zu mehr als 2000 Jahre alten archäologischen Funden von Pferden auf Rädern und stellt fest: sie waren immer schon technische und materielle Artefakte.

Dies steht im Widerspruch zur Wahrnehmung, dass alles Digitale – und damit auch digitale Spiele – Teil eines dramatischen Umbruchs in Kindheit und Gesellschaft sei.

In unserem Gesprächsformat „Kameraethnographie trifft Seth Giddings“ erkunden wir das Spannungsfeld von Tradition und Umbruch im digitalen Spiele-Alltag von Kindern anhand ausgewählter Filme aus unserer Forschung, die wir mit der Lektüre von „Toy Theory“ kreuzen. Dabei fokussieren wir körperliche ‚Doings‘, sowie physische und virtuelle Präsenzen.

Literatur:

Giddings, Seth (2024): Toy Theory. Technology and Imagination in Play. The MIT Press [Einleitung: S. 1-19]

Wer teilnehmen möchte, sendet bitte eine Mail an astrid.vogelpohl[æt]uni-siegen.de, um den Webex-Link und den Text zu erhalten.

The Mobile Sensing working group focuses on the analysis and cultural-historical reconstruction of mobile sensing as an epistemic and media-technological ensemble that has emerged since the 1960s at the intersection of sensor technologies and robotics, networked computing practices, and mobility infrastructures. In the context of the CRC Media of Operation, mobile sensing has been implicitly and explicitly discussed in connection to autonomous vehicles and ‘smart’ cycling, robotic navigation, crowd- and/or citizen sensing, virtual fencing, and civilian and military practices of drone use, among others. The workshop will explore the technological and scientific development of the conceptual and applied field(s) of mobile sensing through three distinct relations between mobility and sensing: 

• (im)mobility facilitated by and through sensing
• the sensing of mobility and moving things
• sensing in motion.

Sensing Immersion: Video passthrough, bodily technologies and sense coupling in co-extensive reality

Chris Salter (Zurich University of the Arts)

The introduction of worn mixed reality devices such as the Meta Quest 2 or the Apple Vision Pro marks an important shift towards re-centering virtual experience back onto the human body as a mediator between self, others and the world. Yet, as optical sensing technologies and their associated algorithms transform virtual reality headsets into camera-based sensing systems that “passthrough” the outside world to the wearer using live video technology, wearers increasingly must navigate two spaces simultaneously: a computationally shaped and at the same time, still phenomenally experienced physical world. This is in marked contrast to virtual reality, which has historically ignored the physical world together with the complex ways in which human bodies make sense of its affordances for perception. Taking up Saker and Frith’s description of co-extensive space (2022), we argue that we can only perceptually grasp such mediated experience through what is called “sense making” – in which an entanglement between human and machine sensing is seen as essential for understanding joint forms of meaning making. Such „participatory sense making“ as a tight sensory coupling between human and machine sensing is in marked contrast to either suggesting that machine sensing is either wholly responsible for world making on the one side (data extraction) or, privileging the human or biological as the unique site of sensory cognition, on the other.

The talk will act as the kick-off for the workshop “Mobile Sensing / Sensing Mobility” 

No need to commit to workshop participation. If you just want to listen to the talk, feel free to join us on Tuesday.

Please register here: https://my.liberaforms.org/talk-registration-sensing-immersion

Chris Salter is Professor for Immersive Arts and Director of the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). He is also Professor Emeritus, Design and Computation Arts at Concordia University in Montreal and former Co-Director of the Hexagram network for research-creation in arts, cultures and technology and Co-Founder of the Milieux Institute at Concordia. He studied philosophy and economics at Emory University and completed his PhD in theatre studies with research in computer music Stanford University. His artistic work has been seen all over the world at such venues as the Venice Architecture Biennale, Barbican Centre, Berliner Festspiele, Wiener Festwochen, Grand Palais Immersif, MEET Center, ZKM, Kunstfest Weimar, Musée d’art Contemporain, Muffathalle, EXIT Festival and Vitra Design Museum, among many others. He is the author of three monographs, all published by the MIT Press: Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance ( 2010), Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (2015) and Sensing Machines (2022). 

more information coming soon

Elena Pilipets (University of Siegen)

Einladung zum Workshop und Blicklabor „I’m fighting!“

Körper – Imagination – Spiel

Projekt B05 „Frühe Kindheit und Smartphone. Familiäre Interaktionsordnung, Lernprozesse und Kooperation des Siegener SFB 1187 „Medien der Kooperation“

28.5.2026, 10 – 17 Uhr

Ort: Universität Siegen, Herrengarten 3, Raum: AH/A 217/18

Ausgehend von aktuellen Filmen aus unserer Forschung möchten wir uns mit der Frage beschäftigen, wie sich in den alltäglichen Medienpraktiken in Familien mit jungen Kindern das Verhältnis von (Kinder-)Körper, Imagination und digitalen (Spiel-)Objekten zeigt.

Die Komplexität dieses Verhältnisses zeigt sich beispielsweise in einer im Rahmen des Projektes beobachteten Szene, in der ein Junge auf dem Sofa liegt, während auf dem einige Meter entfernten Laptop-Bildschirm eine Horde Kämpfer ineinander verstrickt, gegeneinander antritt. Auf die Frage, was er gerade tue, antwortet der Junge spontan und mit völliger Selbstverständlichkeit: „I’m fighting!“ Die in dem kamera-ethnografischen Film beobachtbare Verschiebung des Da-Seins (an zwei Orten gleichzeitig sein) nehmen wir zum Ausgangspunkt, um über das Verhältnis von Körpern und Imagination im digitalen Alltag nachzudenken. Folgende Überlegungen leiten dabei die aktuellen Analysen im Projekt zum Aufwachsen der Kinder mit dem Smartphone und sind die Grundlage der gemeinsamen Filmbetrachtungen.

Körper:

Die „soziale Person des Kindes [lässt] sich nicht mehr umstandslos auf ihre Kern-Eigenschaft als Bewohnerin und Besitzerin ihres sich entwickelnden fleischlichen und berührbaren Körpers rezentrieren. […] Vielmehr scheint es plausibel, (Kinder-)Körper als immer schon eingebettet und materiell wie sinnlich konstituiert in kooperativen digital-medialen Praktiken zu denken und zu verstehen“ (Amann, Wiesemann 2026:35).

Imagination:

Imagination ist kein Phänomen, das im menschlichen Gehirn zentriert ist, sondern vielmehr eine technische Errungenschaft, die aus dem Zusammenwirken (im Spiel insbesondere aus dem Zusammenspiel) von Geist, Körper, kultureller und physischer Umgebung sowie Objekten und Systemen – nicht zuletzt Spielzeug – entsteht (vgl. Giddings 2024:134).

Literatur:

Amann, Klaus und Jutta Wiesemann (2026): Berührung, Körper und smarte Geräte in digitalen Kindheiten. In: Sabine Bollig, Marion Ott, Friederike Schmidt & Anja Tervooren (Hg.): Kindheit als Praxis – Kulturanalytische Zugänge zur alltäglichen Herstellung von Kindheit(en). Beltz Juventa (+ open access)

Giddings, Seth (2024): Toy Theory. Technology and Imagination in Play. The MIT Press.

Teilnehmende:

Jochen Lange und Lia Cordes, Uni Siegen / Jürgen Streeck, University of Texas at Austin / Lisa Anders, Uni Mainz / Klaus Amann

Der Workshop findet auf Deutsch statt. 

__________________________________________________________________________________

Sensorische Selbstvermessung mit Smartwatches und das Teilen von Gesundheitsdaten in Sozialen Netzwerken, Kontrolle von Umweltdaten im intelligenten Zuhause sowie Telemedizin und digitale Assistenzsysteme zur Förderung von Gesundheit und Prävention gelten als Beispiele für die „Medizin der Zukunft“. Diese hat sowohl Licht- als auch Schattenseiten. Wie gehen die Nutzerinnen und Nutzer vor diesem Hintergrund mit den neuen Technologien und den damit verbundenen sozialen Erwartungen, Hoffnungen und Sorgen praktisch um? Das Projekt „Un/erbetene Beobachtung in Interaktion“ im Sonderforschungsbereich „Medien der Kooperation“ an der Universität Siegen untersucht durch Interviews, begleitete Wohnungsrundgänge und Videoaufzeichnungen das alltägliche Leben mit „smarten“ Technologien zwischen (Selbst-)Überwachung und kreativer Aneignung. In der Podiumsdiskussion debattieren die Projektverantwortlichen über gesundheitsbezogene Aspekte mit Forschenden verschiedener Disziplinen und mit dem Siegener Publikum.

Podiumsteilnehmer: 

Prof. Dr. Stefan Heinemann, Professor für Wirtschaftsethik an der FOM Hochschule Berlin sowie Sprecher der Ethik-Ellipse Smart Hospital der Universitätsmedizin Essen

Prof. Dr. Dagmar Hoffmann, Professorin für Medienwissenschaft – Medien und Kommunikation/Gender Media Studies an der Universität Siegen & SFB 1187, Teilprojekt B06

Dr. Paula Stehr, Akademische Rätin am Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU)

Prof. Dr. Torsten Voigt, Professor für Soziologie mit dem Schwerpunkt Technik und Diversität, RWTH Aachen

Moderation: Prof. Dr. Stephan Habscheid, Professor für Germanistik/Angewandte Sprachwissenschaft an der Universität Siegen & SFB 1187, Teilprojekt B06.

Thematischer Impuls zum Einstieg: Niklas Strüver, M.A., SFB 1187, Teilprojekt B06.

14:15 – 15:00 Dr. Johannes Schick: „The Zoomorphology of Gestures: Interspecies Learning and Technical Invention in Early Human Evolution“

15:00 – 15:45 Dr. Dominik Schrey: title t.b.a.

More information coming soon.

Dr. Johannes Schick: „The Zoomorphology of Gestures: Interspecies Learning and Technical Invention in Early Human Evolution“

This article develops a transindividual theory of multispecies technics. Drawing on Gilbert Simondon’s ontogenetic theory of individuation, I extend his concept of the associated milieu beyond the relation between humans and technical objects to interspecies relations. I argue that the earliest technical gestures in hominin history may have emerged from the reciprocal relationship between human and non-human animals, and I introduce the notion of zoogestures to characterise this transindividual multispecies process. Three criteria operationalise the multispecies associated milieu: a living being must co-constitute the conditions of an operation involving another living being; the operation must depend on the presence or behaviour of that other living being; and the relation must open up or stabilise new possibilities for action. I test this heuristic against three cases of interspecies technical operations: social learning between domesticated horses (ponying) and within wild chimpanzee populations (Tinka); the invention of a new technical behaviour by a domesticated cow (Veronika) in a human milieu; and the multispecies ecological co-construction of beaver-human cohabitation in prehistory. The conclusion develops Simondon’s notion of présence to argue that technical gestures emerge not as Leroi-Gourhan’s exudations or extensions of the (human) body, but as a multispecies event.

• 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.

more information coming soon

Prof. Maija Hirvonen (Tampere University)

14:15 – 15:00 Dr. Tim Hector

15:00 – 15:45 Dr. Astrid Vogelpohl

More information coming soon.

More information coming soon.

14:15 – 15:45: „Counter-Choreographies of Data: Activism Between Platform and Ground“

This lecture examines how methodological choices distribute attention, agency, and legibility within knowledge production, focusing on digital platforms as contested sites where data is shaped by algorithmic infrastructures, political pressure, and regimes of visibility. Social media posts are approached not as neutral evidence, but as partial and mediated traces of activism.

Drawing on personal research practice, the lecture traces digital content back to its on-site realities—embodied experiences, spatial conditions, and forms of risk that remain off-screen. Through performative reactivation, these traces are re-situated to produce counter-narratives that disrupt the manipulated datasets of authoritarian regimes, transforming research into a site for witnessing, resistance, and collective memory.

The concept of “counter-choreographies of data” frames this methodology as a political intervention that foregrounds the uncounted, blinded, and misrepresented. Positioning research as activism, the lecture argues for cooperative methodologies that make conflicts over categories, metrics, and evidence explicit, accountable, and revisable.

Azadeh Ganjeh (Hochschule für Künste im Sozialen Ottersberg / Mercator Fellow @ SFB 1187 Media of Cooperation)

Azadeh Ganjeh is a Performance Artist and scholar specializing in the intersection of socio-political contexts and the realm of Performance Art and performative culture. Her research, rooted in the observance and analysis of public interventions, protests, performance events and Theatres, reveals the intricate link between performance art and socio-political movements. Since 2004, with her collective, Rebel-IST-hah!, her artistic practice has focused on aesthetic strategies and dramaturgical interventions to create an inclusive space of appearance and activism through the Performing Arts. As an activist and performance artist, her research project focuses on the aesthetics of the performative presence of the body in the public space as resistance. She traces these performances through a focus on non-Eurocentric historiography of civil resistance in the Global South and climate activism in sacrifice zones, which occurs through Performing Arts. Due to the state’s opposition to her secular approach, advocacy for academic freedom, and her active role as a feminist artist and activist, she encountered political restraints and threats from the authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and since 2022, found herself compelled to seek exile in Germany as a Scholar at Risk.

16:00 – 17:30: „Machineries of Similarity and Difference: AIDS From Its Research Infrastructures“

What kinds of practical and epistemic work are required to draw together different kinds of data, people, and evidence? This talk examines ‚interoperability‘ by tracing the history of three AIDS cohort studies that, over three decades, were gradually merged into a single research network. Today, with a double-click, researchers can combine data collected from gay and bisexual men in the 1980s with materials gathered from women in the North of the US beginning in the 1990s and in the South of the US in the 2010s—data that remain scientifically comparable. Yet today’s apparent ease reveals next to nothing about the political protests and scientific disputes that made such comparability possible. The interoperability of these AIDS research data rests on decades of negotiation over how blood, data, and human participants could be rendered equivalent.

David Ribes (University of Washington)

David Ribes is professor in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) and director of the Science, Technology and Society Studies (STSS) program at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is a sociologist of science and technology who focuses on the development and sustainability of research infrastructures; their relation to long-term changes in the conduct of science; and, transformations in objects of research. David is a regular contributor to the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Information Studies. His methods are ethnographic, archival-historical and comparative. See davidribes.com or dataecologi.es for 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.

The GDPR promises us that we can receive our personal data from anyone who collected it upon request. Research has already shown this does not really work as envisioned in law.

This lecture asks to dig deeper into the topic, by approaching data subject rights, in particular Article 15 GDPR, as a methodological device for studying digital infrastructures under conditions of limited access. Access rights are first a legal protection and empowerment measure, but we examine how they can be used to trace tracking practices, data flows and processes of identity formation in online advertising ecosystems. In the course of this research we bridge media studies and digital methods with legal studies. The data collection process is first an encounter with the infrastructures that exist to inform users, but also an encounter of the user with fragments of themselves.

From a legal perspective, we analyse how data protection law conceptualises different forms of identity and how identities are legally attributed to a data subject. At the same time, we interrogate the limits of this framework: while the GDPR presupposes that personal data can be linked to an identified or identifiable natural person, contemporary data practices routinely challenge these distinctions. Identities emerge from combinations of data points that individually fall below the threshold of “personal data,” yet collectively constitute a recognisable profile. The legal figure of the data subject is thus both a normative construct and an unstable one, continuously deconstructed and reassembled by digital infrastructures.

Yarden Skop & Maria Boole (University of Paderborn & Siegen / Project A07 @ SFB 1187 Media of Cooperation)

14:15 – 15:00 Dr. Clemens Eisenmann: „Sociology of Perception“

15:00 – 15:45 Dr. Philippe Sormani: „Relocating ‘AI’: a Praxeological Approach“

More information coming soon.

Further Information will follow

With a keynote by Prof. Dr. Waverly Duck (University of California Santa Barbara).
More info coming soon.

More info coming soon.

More info coming soon.

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.

Histories of Tracking

Université de Luxembourg | Universität Siegen

September 30 – October 2, 2026

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!

Possible thematic sections:

• Investigating tracking: activism, journalism, legal practice
• And all I got was a targeted ad
• Identification regimes, digital forensics and the human body
• Tracking beyond the West
• After 9/11: surveillance, terrorism and security
• Sensing environments and mobilized surveillance
• Counter-practices and resistance through time 
• Trajectories of debates, actors, issues, and controversies in the public space

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.

The Conference is organized by Valérie Schafer, C²DH, Université de Luxembourg, and Sebastian Gießmann, CRC Media of Cooperation, Siegen; project A01: Digital Network Technologies between Specialization and Generalization and supported by the FNR, Luxembourg and DFG, Germany.

The 2026 annual conference of the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” explores the politics of cooperative sensing and sense-making in a time marked by geopolitical crises, technological transformation, and democratic uncertainty. Across the world, societies are facing overlapping challenges: wars, the climate catastrophe, democratic backsliding, and the rise of authoritarian regimes, all of which are deeply entangled with the rise of datafication. At the same time, digital infrastructures, data practices, and generative AI are transforming how people cooperate, communicate, and perceive reality. Cooperation today takes place across complex sociotechnical networks – from alliances between governments and technology companies to collaborations between civil society, research communities, and activists networks. Digitalisation is built on cooperative media and data practices. Yet today, these same cooperative structures increasingly enable digital political violence. This conference asks how these forms of cooperation shape contemporary politics and sensory experiences. How do media and data practices contribute to new forms of power, control, and digital violence? How do they shape collective perception, uncertainty, and conflict? And how can cooperative practices also enable resistance, democratic engagement, and new forms of knowledge production?

more info coming soon.