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.