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.

The conference, entitled ‘Language Connects: Cooperative Communicative Practices in Media Societies’, focuses on all types of linguistic and communicative media practices (in the broadest sense) through which actors, acting (more or less) in accordance with the situation, work towards facilitating cooperation and/or sustainably promoting cohesion, or counteracting the production of categories of social difference.

A conference itself also constitutes a cooperative communicative practice sui generis. This becomes particularly evident when it is not merely an academic conference. This conference is being held to mark the 60th birthday of Prof. Dr Stephan Habscheid, and the organising team is delighted to be able to engage in in-depth discussions with the speakers and all conference participants on specific and, in our view, highly relevant aspects of cooperative communicative practices.

To aid planning, the organising team would ask that you send an informal registration to Jan Gerwinski (gerwinski[at]germanistik.uni-siegen.de) by 15 September 2026.

more information will come

Archives have long since ceased to be understood as neutral repositories of the past. A rich body of critical scholarship has shown them to be contested infrastructures through which memories, histories, publics, and relations of power are shaped, negotiated, and erased (Foucault 1972; Mbembe 2002; Stoler 2009). Yet, much of this work has remained primarily concerned with the archive as a site of preservation, governance, contestation, or, in its counter-archival inversion, resistance.

Rather than revisiting these debates, this workshop asks what they look like when viewed through the lens of cooperation. We follow the fluid movements and diverse incentives through which different publics mobilize, rebuild, uncover, conceal, and seek to erase recollections of past events. This workshop shifts attention to archiving as an ongoing practice of cooperation, understood as the mutual production of the means and procedures of interaction (Schüttpelz and Gießmann 2015). It examines how and why the past is remembered and made public in the present through media, infrastructures, institutions, technologies, and environments; how particular versions of it circulate and acquire authority; and how its traces are maintained, transformed, contested, or erased. From this perspective, the archive is approached as an infrastructure of cooperation, grounded in distributed, material, and mediated practices of memory work through which past events are made sensible, publics are formed, and futures are imagined.

Approaching archives in this way shifts attention from what archives contain to the heterogeneous practices and relations through which they are assembled. It foregrounds the cooperative work that connects memories, their custodians, and the material and mediated traces through which they endure, while revealing how memories are produced, stabilized, contested, and transformed as different publics mobilize competing versions of the past. Like all forms of cooperation, these processes may falter, exclude, fragment, or break down.

The workshop asks what forms of cooperative work bring archives into being, hold them together, transform them, or allow them to fall apart. It follows archival traces as they circulate through landscapes, religious networks, migrant mobilities, museum collections, artistic practices, administrative records, and digital platforms. How do a colonial water system, a military ruin, a statue of Mary, a museum object, an administrative file, an old train timetable, or a sensor record become enrolled in new forms of cooperation that assemble publics and generate meanings beyond their original purpose?

The workshop brings Susan Slyomovics’ work on memory, heritage, vernacular archives, and postcolonial justice in North Africa and the Middle East (Slyomovics 1998, 2005) into conversation with current research within the SFB Media of Cooperation to explore archives as infrastructures of cooperation through which memories, publics, and possible futures are continuously made and remade.

Expected program: 

Keynote lecture

Susan Slyomovics (UCLA) , keynote lecture; discussant: Sevi Bayraktar(HfmtKöln)

Panel I: Sustaining: the labor that holds recollections of the past together

How is the past kept alive through repetition, transmission, maintenance, and care, and who is enrolled in that work?

Carla Tiefenbacher (B04) Catholic networks, voluntourism, travelling Marian statues, cemeteries, and transnational Catholic memory

P01 (Meyer/Mondada) sensory mediation, embodied memory, and cooperative practices of transmission

Nina ter Laan (B04) transnational memory activism and contemporary engagements with the material remains of colonialism in the Rif

Panel II: Breaking and sensing: absences, gaps, and cooperation that fails

What happens when archival cooperation fails, and how is this sensed and made meaningful?

A04 (Potthast) institutional infrastructures, maintenance and breakdown, public administration

P06 (Baraikyte) war sensing, documentation, and conflict archives

Martin Zillinger (B04) haunted water infrastructures, agricultural modernism, and environmental afterlives of colonial and postcolonial development in Morocco

Panel III: Future-making: imagining collectivities, claims, and repair

How do archival practices construct identity/collectivities, and project futures, including through restitution and historical justice?

Birgit Meyer (Utrecht University) religious heritage, mediation, museums, and restitution

Anna Brus (Cologne University)museum collections, and provenance research

A01 (Gießmann) historical media infrastructures, networked archives, and archival practices

Roundtable discussion

Closing roundtable with all participants, reflection on cross-cutting themes.

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