Annual Conference 2024
International Conference
“Scaling Sensing – Sensing Publics: Landscapes and Borders, Homes and Bodies”
University of Siegen, 13 – 15 November 2024
Obergraben 25, 57072 Siegen
US-S 001 / 002
About the conference
“Scaling Sensing – Sensing Publics: Landscapes and Borders, Homes and Bodies”
The Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” first annual conference of its third and final funding phase, explores the interplay between sensing and the public. Through the theme “Scaling Sensing – Sensing Publics. Landscapes, and Borders, Homes and Bodies” the conference examines the mutually constitutive dynamics of sensing practices and the publics they shape and are shaped by, through multi-perspective, interdisciplinary approaches to sensing practices in graduated, fragmented, and heterogenous public spheres. How are sensors and sensing practices shaped within different public realms?
The pervasive integration of sensor technologies is fundamentally changing the way we perceive, sense, and produce knowledge. Technological sensors are capable of making their captured data visible and credible in ways human and environmental sensors cannot: they track movement, measure health data, and analyze built and grown environments. Thereby, they influence diverse settings, ranging from landscapes to cities, to homes and bodies. They both enhance and obscure bodily sensorial practices and intervene in their publicity and intersubjectivity. While sensor media might offer solutions to social, political, technological, medical, and environmental challenges, they also raise ethical and political concerns, such as privacy erosion, disconnection between sensory data and sensory experiences, controversial forms of surveillance, and the socio-technical diffusion of prejudices and various forms of bias. Thus, sensor data, their collection, analysis, and integration with other data formats, and within various social practices, groups of people, and institutions are constitutive not only of sensing but also of publicity and publicness. This conference aims to refine our understanding of the relationship between sensing and publics by examining collaboratively constituted sensors, media, and sensations across different research fields. Contributions present case studies from diverse disciplines and foreground practice in their theoretical stance, addressing the interplay between sensing and publics across four key domains:
- Landscapes. Use of sensors in environmental settings, such as in cities, forests, waters, agricultural terrains, or resource management;
- Borders. Sensing practices and control at physical and digital borders or within communities, such as in settings of migration, security, and bureaucratic control;
- Homes. Sensor applications in domestic spaces, such as smart home technologies, security, care, and design;
- Bodies. Situated embodied sensing in social interaction, and the (dis)connections with wearable sensors, biometric identification, quantified and embodied self in social, religious, and health settings.
These four key domains represent different scales of publicness involved in sensing, but also a range of different sociopolitical and environmental contexts in which various forms of socio-technical sensing occur, distributed among multiple actors, including humans, machines, and the environment.
To enhance interdisciplinary dialogue and debate, all contributions engage with the broader issues of sensing and publicity that guide this conference and address the following questions:
- How are sensing and sensing practices shaped within different public realms?
- Who and what is being sensed, by whom, and for what practical purpose?
- Which relationships are established between sensing, sensors, the sensed, and materiality/the environment?
- What happens to sensory data, how are they used and how might they be misused?
- What are the ethical and political implications of distributed sensing? What happens to the intersubjectivity of sensing in embodied practices and technologically augmented practices?
- What are the individual, social, ethical, political, and environmental consequences of interacting with sensing technologies?
Program
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TUESDAY, 12 Nov.
WEDNESDAY, 13 Nov.
The Celebration of 80 Years Karin Knorr-Cetina is cancelled.
Panel 1: Sensing Landscapes
This panel explores how the interaction between landscapes and different sensing practices (human, digital, and other-than-human) affects the use and interpretation of natural environments by various actors in different ecological and socio-political contexts. As part of the Earth’s surface, landscapes consist of geographic features, both natural and human-made. Mountains, plains, lakes, rivers, soils, and vegetation, as well as dams, fences, roads, bridges, and parks, not only constitute the spatial and physical dimensions of our world but also carry cultural narratives and beliefs, that shape personal and community identities. In particular, we highlight the tension between the natural characteristics of landscapes and human infrastructuring efforts. Humans modify and recast landscapes for a variety of reasons, by growing crops, caring for animals, building structures, mining, or mapping. At the same time, landscapes profoundly shape our ways of living and understanding the world. We conceptualize these human-landscape entanglements as spatial and material records of collective pasts, presents, and futures, that can be destructive, such as deforestation, pollution, extraction, and war, or constructive, such as conservation, protection, and reforestation initiatives. Rather than seeing landscapes as passive backdrops for human activity and imagination, we see them as active media that both influence and are influenced by sensing practices (including human senses, sensor technologies, but also sentinels and organisms). In doing so, this panel asks how these sensing practices affect our understanding and management of landscapes, and how landscapes, in turn, shape these sensing practices.
Saadia Mirza (University of Chicago/ Sciences Po, Paris)
More than an instinct or reflex, sensing is a situated and experiential practice that exposes the many aesthetic and political parameters of human consciousness. The concept of landscape unravels a similar phenomenon – a view from somewhere that is constructed, discovered, and situated rather than pre-existing (Berque 2013, Karatani 1993). In geography, the cartographic classifications of landscape and its topology, terrain, topography, and territory are deeply tied to the evolution of ‘sensing’ as a technique and a method. Whether we speak of Humboldt’s use of the cyanometer for qualifying the exact blueness of the sky in the late 1700s, or the multispectral sensors of the 21st century to detect soil composition, knowledge of landscape has always relied on sensibilities – or sense-abilities – that are at once material and discursive. Moreover, these practices are embedded in historical, political, and cultural contexts with their own regimes of truth and judgment. However, these techniques and tools of sensing also reveal an ever more elusive idea of landscape where matter and meaning are as indistinguishable as the human and nonhuman agents that constitute it (Mirza 2023). In this keynote, I address how vibrations, resonances, bandwidths, and frequencies in more-than-human sensing systems create fluid impressions of materiality, boundaries, borders, terrain, and topography, expanding the consciousness of landscape. Since the declassification of remotely sensed data in the 1990s, various models of a single landscape have become possible, with sensors that exceed the limits of the human sensorium. Whether tracing historical migration routes, modeling new borders, simulating archaeological sites, or rendering the changing shape of coastlines, these advanced sensing practices offer new ways to re-map and rephrase the complex web of human-environment relations. I argue that by creating new sensory thresholds, these practices foster emergent rationalities that profoundly impact the social, political, and cultural understanding of the concept of landscape.
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Dominik Schrey (University of Siegen, CRC 1187)
In 1911, Georg Simmel described the high-Alpine realm of the glaciers as “the absolutely ‘unhistorical’ landscape” where all “associations with the human fate, which comes into being and passes away, are broken off, associations which in some way or other accompany all other landscapes.” However, when Simmel wrote these lines, the Alpine glaciers were already “envirotechnical landscapes” (Pritchard, 2011), making it difficult to draw a strict line between natural features and anthropogenic influences. Not only are they embedded in tourism infrastructure, energy production, and border regimes, but in the 19th century, the – already retreating – ice masses also became “sensing landscapes” that served as scientific indicators of environmental changes. Around 1900, for example, geologists discussed glaciers as “gigantic measuring instruments of nature’s own making” (Hagenbach, 1900), although this notion ultimately remained vague (Hupfer, 2019). This paper shows that the history of glaciology is largely about refining these “first-degree sensors” (Fuller/Weizman, 2021) using a variety of “second-degree” sensing practices (such as triangulation milestones, psychrometers, thermometrographs, and precipitation gauges), thereby reinventing the glaciers as laboratories of climate change. Using historical and contemporary examples, I explore glaciological sensing practices and their data, focusing on collaborative efforts between scientists and artists to shape public understanding of climate change.
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Kathrin Friedrich (University of Bonn, CRC 1187)
Farming, and especially livestock farming, is a major factor in the transformation of landscapes, with a long history of infrastructuring land, natural resources, and human-animal interactions, through various types of physical barriers and fences. Nowadays, the fencing of livestock herds, such as cattle or goats, increasingly relies on sensor technologies, through virtual fencing. This remote, semi-automated practice uses GPS data, dedicated applications, and animal-attached sensors, forming a closed-loop sensing network to control livestock in various types of grazing areas. Rather than physically infrastructuring landscapes, virtual fencing relies on “digital landscapes,” such as Google Maps, and is promoted as more flexible, less resource-intensive, and more sustainable than traditional fencing practices. This paper explores the promises of virtual fencing and their implications for landscape infrastructuring. By tracing examples of sensing infrastructures and fencing applications, it addresses how these media practices adapt landscapes for livestock farming and influence human and more-than-human sensing at various levels.
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We show how and why two distinct groups with historical links to the region- former Spanish colonial residents and members of the Dutch Riffian diaspora – periodically return to and interact with the same landscape. We argue that the Riffian landscape is not only a repository of the past, but that its organic processes – affecting plants, the sea, shrapnel, clouds, graves – shape memory practices. Organic and human actants may work together, ignore or aim to overgrow each other in shaping past, present, and future claims to the Rif. In this way, the landscape becomes a space of active testimony that carries with it both the history and the future of different communities.
Nina ter Laan, Carla Tiefenbacher (University of Siegen, CRC 1187)
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David Howes (Concordia University, Montréal)
This talk will explore the interface between the sensing body or sensorium proper and the technosensorium, or distributed sensing. The sensorium is defined, following Walter J. Ong as ‘the entire perceptual apparatus as an operational complex’. According to Ong, differences in cultures ‘can be thought of as differences in the sensorium, the organization of which is in part determined by culture while at the same time it makes culture’ (‘The shifting sensorium’ in The Varieties of Sensory Experience, 1991). Sensory anthropology is concerned with tracing how the techniques of the senses – or ways people know how to use their bodies and senses – vary across cultures.
Futures anthropology focusses on how the technologization or digitization of the sensorium (prosthetic extensions, implants, the Internet) is re-constituting perception and the body. According to computer scientist and futurist Ray Kurzweil, ‘the Singularity’ is nigh. The Singularity is defined as ‘the merger of our biological thinking and existence with our technology. … There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between humans and machines or between physical and virtual reality” (The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology). In effect, sense data will be supplanted by big data. It Kurzweil’s Transhumanist vision is correct, then our thinking or knowledge and our fate (including the fate of our planet) is becoming increasingly, if not totally, dependent on sensors in place of senses, on Artificial Intelligence in place of sentience, smartness in place of wisdom, and the programable in place of the sensible.
This talk will present a ‘minority report’, proposing that we need to keep our wits (an archaic term for senses) about us all the same. It will contest the reduction of sensation to ‘information’ and sensory stimulation to digital simulation under the new world order, and highlight the multiple challenges involved in truly calibrating the techniques of the senses and technologization of perception-action.
Center for Sensory Studies: https://centreforsensorystudies.org/
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THURSDAY, 14 Nov.
Panel 2: Sensing Borders
Borderscapes move across geographic landscapes and bureaucracies through bodies and virtual networks. Enforced through surveillance, they can materialize abruptly or fade into backgrounds, assembling publics, mobilizing memories, and anchoring practices of sur-/sousveillance and in-/exclusion. In current times of war, borderscapes are also defended by state and civilian actors, who use digital and sensor media to document and counteract destruction. The panel asks how human and more-than-human sensors relate to each other to constitute, surveil, dismantle, and negotiate borders and reconfigure security and sociopolitical paradigms.
Valérie Schafer (C2DH, University of Luxembourg, CRC 1187)
In 2003, UNESCO formally acknowledged born-digital heritage, setting a milestone for its preservation at an international scale. However, the landscape of born-digital archiving is fragmented, involving diverse practices, perimeters, collections, and stakeholders (Schafer et al., 2016) operating at several levels from an international one with Internet Archive to more targeted initiatives by researchers and the civil society, through national GLAMs. These entities, as well as researchers, increasingly grapple with the complexities of transnational circulation and studies and face significant challenges, for example analyzing the digital traces of the COVID crisis (Aasman et al., 2022). Institutional web archives often adhere to national borders. They are constrained by copyright laws and access restrictions, and collections may also face interoperability issues. This talk will therefore primarily explore the boundaries of web archives, whether related to access (such as in the archiving of social platforms), digital enclosures, legal frameworks, or the governance that shapes organizational structures. The intricate digital rights management, national jurisdictional limitations, and the technical barriers of archiving platforms reveal part of the multifaceted challenges in preserving born-digital heritage across borders. The second part of the presentation will delve deeper into some invisible barriers, addressing the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion within digital archiving. Highlighting initiatives like DocNow during the Ferguson unrest and the subsequent Black Lives Matter movement, or SUCHO for preserving Ukrainian cultural heritage online in times of war, this part considers ‘live archives’, underscoring the ongoing negotiations of borders and practices in times of crisis. Through these examples, we aim to shed light on efforts led by institutions, universities, or civil society to navigate and transcend the boundaries that define the archival landscape, promoting a more inclusive and comprehensive approach to digital heritage preservation, not without creating debates, needs for adaptation, and sometimes controversies.
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Christoph Borbach (Universität Siegen, CRC 1187)
Taking into account the current consolidation of invisible borders in so-called “Virtual Fencing” in the context of smart farming, the presentation investigates flexibilizations in the channeling of the flow of animals, people, and signals in agriculture based on fencing techniques and materials. Fences as inconspicuous logistical media, largely neglected by media research, can be described as early interfaces that decided on the inclusion and exclusion of animals from (and to) certain terrains. Terrain modification and formatting through fencing technologies therefore structured geographical areas according to their own logics. The co-constitution of (farm) animal and (farm) technology is just as worthy of investigation as the advertising narratives of historically new forms of fencing, which repeatedly promised “precision” and “flexibility” in controlling the movement of animals.
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Hendrik Bender and Max Kanderske (University of Siegen, CRC 1187)
Military drones have never cared for national borders. Indeed, the premise of models like the notorious Reaper and Predator, which have been explicitly designed to operate far outside domestic U.S. territory, has always been to enact violence on territories and people across borders. This changed in 2022, when the Bayraktar drone emerged as a symbol of Ukrainian resistance – a last-ditch defensive measure, employed within the besieged nation’s own air space. The Baryaktar quickly turned into a pop culture icon that circulated through social media via videos, songs, and memes. But its actual use on the battlefield soon got overshadowed by another type of drone, as the humble consumer drone, originally advertised as a peacetime entertainment technology by its manufacturers like DJI and Autel, got enlisted to patrol the shifting frontlines.
We argue that this move towards off-the-shelf consumer drones that do not depend on large-scale socio-technical infrastructures to function has given rise to new practices of wartime drone operation and modification that mark a decided shift from the use of earlier military drones. As depictions of drone violence circulate through social media platforms, entering our day-to-day media environments and eliciting international support for the war effort through crowdfunding schemes, consumer drone warfare extends far beyond the actual battlefield. Consequently, consumer drone warfare as a media event is characterized by the logic of social media platforms and targeted advertising that demands individual participation.
While drones are used as tools for enforcing or transgressing national borders, other boundaries get called into question by them. They blur the line between war- and peacetime aesthetics, between highly localized battlefields and global online spaces; and they produce graphic and intimate accounts of war that can act as a site for negotiating the legitimacy of the violence drones help to enact in the first place.
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Max Kanderske’s CRC profile ➞
Food Court at the Siegen Mensa
Panel 3: Sensing Bodies
The panel is dedicated to the issue of how sensory practices and multisensoriality can be conceptualized and analyzed within social interactions. A double focus will be discussed, regarding embodied sensing in interaction and the interfaces between various technical-sensory and human actors. Drawing on interdisciplinary praxeological perspectives, notions like “embodiment”, “inter-corporality,” and “body” will be conceptually and empirically explored in their multimodal (linguistic and embodied) manifestations as well as socio-cultural and material situated ecologies. Different forms of (co)presence of the body/bodies will be considered, as produced through sensory practices, including different forms of multisensory perceiving and being perceived in everyday life, families, and institutions — within complex relationships between humans, things, animals, and digital media.
Lorenza Mondada, Anne Rawls, Christian Meyer, Philippe Sormani, Clemens Eisenmann (University of Siegen, CRC 1187)
This first part of Panel 3 will reflect on how multisensoriality is experienced in social interaction, within situated activities, and how it is eventually enhanced/(re)shaped/transformed by artefacts. It will discuss the public accountability of sensorial practices, regarding how bodies engaging in sensing interaction achieve together the intersubjectivity of their experience. This public accountability is established through the witnessability and shareability of sensorial practices, which are multisensorial, co-sensorial, and intercorporeal. Intersubjectivity is built through how participants engage in sensory practices and actions, and respond to each other: the panel will discuss different forms of (a)symmetric engagements and sequential environments in which sensoriality is experienced and negotiated by the participants. It will also discuss how intersubjectivity might also be normatively achieved, secured, and sometimes constrained by various material artifacts, and the way these artifacts intervene in the embodied practices of sensing. This slot will be articulated in three contributions to discuss how ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and phenomenology approach various facets of sensoriality in interaction, such as sensing materiality, sensing the other, and how artifacts feature in sensorial practices.
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Lorenza Mondada’s CRC profile ➞
Anne Rawls’s CRC profile ➞
Christian Meyer’s CRC profile ➞
Philippe Sormani’s CRC profile ➞
Clemens Eisenmann’s CRC profile ➞
Astrid Vogelpohl and Hoa Mai Trần (University of Siegen, CRC 1187)
In this presentation, we draw upon empirical examples from the long-term camera ethnographic study “(Early) Childhood and Smartphone”, ongoing since 2016, to explore the cooperative entanglement of the human and technical sensorium in the context of digital games. Sensory experiences unfold in human and more-than-human bodies and generate new ways of being in the world and “ways of worldmaking” (cf. Goodman 1978). With camera-ethnographic vignettes and fieldnotes, we will trace the interrelations between physical-analog and digital sensory practices in digital play and challenge assumptions about the separability of virtual and physical bodies. Our examination of how animated characters such as an injured owl or a thieving villager evoke emotions suggests that emotions are not simply a pre-conditioned response to a stimulus, but are mutually brought forth in more-than-human bodily practices. This observation leads us to ask: How and with which bodies do children interact and/or intra-act in digital play?
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Astrid Vogelpohl ’s CRC profile ➞
Hoa Mai Trần’s CRC profile ➞
Jochen Lange and Farah Brandt (University of Siegen, CRC 1187)
The talk focuses ethnographically on practices and actions with specific, sensor-based media: Telepresence robots or avatars in primary schools. These devices take the place of a child in the classroom, who connects to the robot via tablet from home and operates it. Seeing and being seen, hearing and being heard, speaking and being spoken to as well as moving and being moved are challenged anew in everyday classroom practice. New human-technology figurations are emerging that enable spatially distributed sensory perception of individual pupils. Using empirical examples from an ongoing study on the use of this technology, we ask how presence and social interaction are shaped under such altered bodily and sensory conditions. To this end, we draw on praxeological and posthumanist discourses that question the boundaries and extensions of the body.
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Jürgen Streeck (University of Texas, Austin)
This talk centers around a banal ordinary situation: a man with a cat in his lap. I am interested in what goes on socially in this situation, what communication takes place, if any, how the experience of touching and being touched frames the interaction, and how affect is felt and spread between human and cat: what kinds of intersubjectivity can arise in a relationship without access to human language and without any hope of mirror ing, or otherwise having access to, one another’s minds. Touch is still one of the least explored among human modalities of communication, even though many insights have recently been gained, not least in Siegen (Mohn et al. 2023), including about tactility in the relationship between humans and cats (Althans 2023). Tactility is, as the word says, key to what goes on between humans and their pets.
Constance Classen (2012) has called touch ‘the deepest sense’. I will describe various forms of touch and their attendant affect in interactions with Jazzy, my cat, and distinguish different degrees of depth at which I experience her embodied self. The situation glossed as ‘cat in man’s lap’ appears to be the deepest variety, contributing to a state of ‘we-ness’, an inter-species ‘with’ (Goffman 1971). Human and cat form a single self-sustaining affective system, even if how that feels to the cat will forever remain a mystery to the human, and vice versa.
I will describe how this particular form of tactile togetherness came into existence within a growing web of habitualized sequences of interaction between my cat and myself, including tactile interactions such as my caressing her face and head under her guidance or our ‘mutual allo-grooming’ before she prepares to go to sleep next to me on the sofa, bench, or bed. Togetherness, in the sense of sustained states of passive tactile contact experienced by the human as ‘we’-ness, is an interactional accomplishment of turn-by-turn interaction which it then transcends.
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Unteres Schloß 1, 57072 Siegen
FRIDAY, 15 Nov.
Panel 4: Sensing Homes
With the development of smart home technologies, our understanding of home and domestic life is changing and previous boundaries between the private and public spheres are being challenged. Smart home technologies include various technologies such as robots, smart fridges, and voice assistants, most of which are equipped with sensors or operate using sensor data. Different user groups pursue different goals and purposes with sensor technologies in the home, e.g. monitoring one’s health is now a trend in many age groups, while fall prevention is mainly reserved for older citizens. It is often about control and safety, but always also about convenience, which is why sensors are increasingly found in our private environment to make our everyday lives and associated tasks easier. With this in mind, where does privacy begin and where does it end? The term ‘home’ refers to a personally appropriated and meaningful space that enables intimate relationships and serves as a protected place for individual fulfillment and retreat. Sensor technologies, e.g. IoT-connected devices such as smart speakers and cameras collect, store, and process personal data from such sanctity spaces, while such data practices of technology providers often disappear into the invisible, no longer perceptible to the user. This panel highlights (1) the complex dynamics of ‘home’ and perceptual practices by focusing on the intersection of embodied and technological forms of perception that shape individuals’ interactions and sensemaking practices with their ‘home’, and (2) current possibilities and desirable future scenarios of sensor-based support measures for a critical reflection and ethical validation of their design and implementation in private ‘homes’.
Mathias Funk (Eindhoven University of Technology)
When we were promised smart homes that sounded like a bright future solving for convenience, loneliness, elderly care, safety, democratization, and more. Alas, the homes are not smart, but full of things now. In this talk, we will take a journey from the early visions of home IoT to thing-centered design approaches and design research on the smart home. We will look beyond sensing and ubiquitous data collection, and develop a renewed vision of what an intelligence-augmented Everyday could be.
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Gunnar Stevens (Universität Siegen/ Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg)
The private space is crucial for the well-being and freedom of the individual. Domestic privacy is particularly protected by law, which applies above all to state interference and commercial surveillance attempts. Usable Security helps users protect their privacy from these attempts. Yet, less is known about privacy norms and practices within the home. The spectrum of privacy issues within households is broad and diverse, ranging from everyday behaviors like password sharing to more concerning issues such as technology abuse and cyber-stalking. The talk aims to shed light on this overlooked topic, using a design lens on the complexities and nuances of privacy within the home.
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Tim Moritz Hector & Niklas Strüver (Universität Siegen, CRC 1187)
During the setup of voice assistants like Alexa or Siri in a domestic context, the assistants ask several questions about their future users like how many household members are there and which bank, music-streaming, Amazon, or Google account to connect. Thus, users are often faced with the task of defining their perceived living situation (e.g. family, shared flat) and fitting it into the predetermined options. In this process, digital technologies are adapted to households, and vice-versa, as users attempt to (infra-)structurate their smart home.
The inquiry about the living arrangement can be interpreted as a moment of calling into question the seldom debated complex dynamics of ‘home’ and notions about (shared) perceptions within it. Based on recordings of the setup processes of smart speakers and an accompanying interview study, we examine how different users perceive, discuss, and define their (smart) living arrangements. We investigate how users reflect on their living situation based on these notions and how they attempt to find infrastructural workarounds (e.g. regarding privacy concerns) to make their arrangements fit while balancing the sensation of remaining in charge of shaping their daily life infrastructure.
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Niklas Strüver’s CRC profile➞
Tanja Aal & Dennis Kirschsieper (Universität Siegen, CRC 1187)
Telecare and telemedicine applications represent a special case of sensor-based smart home technologies, as intimate areas of the home and even the body are affected and large amounts of sensitive data are generated. In our presentation, we discuss desirable and less desirable scenarios of telecare and telemedicine in the private home based on expert interviews with professional caregivers, care scientists, and technology developers. In future scenarios, we focus firstly on the topics of autonomy and privacy, as understanding the technology and controlling data flows can be problematic, especially for older users. Secondly, we address the developments towards more community-based care in Germany and the connections between sensor technology in the private home and the local social environment, i.e. nursing services, doctor’s offices, neighbors, and the entire community in a broad sense.
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Tanja Aal’s CRC profile ➞
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Speakers
Tanja Aal is a research assistant at the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen, Germany. She is part of project A05 “The Cooperative Creation of User Autonomy in the Context of the Ageing Society”. Furthermore, she is a PhD student in Information Systems, esp. IT for the Ageing Society, University of Siegen. Her doctoral research focuses on the (digital) participation and inclusion of human and non-human actors in participatory design processes of future urban and rural environments and on the use of ICT, its potentials, benefits and limitations in community-based settings.
Maya Avis is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Digital Humanities and Multilateralism. She is the co-editor of States of Surveillance: Ethnographies of New Technologies in Policing and Justice (Routledge, 2025). Her work explores legal orders, archives and sur-/sousveillance in Palestine and Israel.
Hendrik Bender works as a research assistant at the project “Agentic Media: Formations of Semi-Autonomy” within the Collaborative Research Centre “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen. His research interests include drone media, media geography, automation and autonomy, media history, and STS.
Christoph Borbach is a postdoctoral researcher at the CRC “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen. He previously worked as a research assistant and lecturer at Leuphana University Lüneburg, University of Vienna, Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle, and Humboldt University of Berlin, among others. He has published in New Media & Society, Interface Critique, Transbordeur and Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft. Latest publication: Delay – Mediengeschichten der Verzögerung, 1850-1950 (Bielefeld: transcript). Main research areas: History of technology & media theory, epistemology & praxeology of the digital.
Farah Brandt has been a research fellow at the University of Siegen since 2022 within the chair of “Educational Science with a focus on the didactics of subject teaching”. Previously, she worked as a researcher at the University of Koblenz-Landau and as an associated project assistant at the PH Zug. She completed her studies in sociology at the University of Mainz in 2020 with a focus on qualitative social research. In her work and dissertation, she focuses on the materiality and mediality of schooling from an ethnographic perspective.
Clemens Eisenmann is postdoctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” at the Universities of Konstanz and Siegen (Germany). His research areas range from social theory, sociology of the body, medicine, religion and media studies, to interaction analysis, ethnomethodology and qualitative methods. His dissertation research at Bielefeld University explored spirituality in contemporary yoga as social practice. Eisenmann studied Sociology, Philosophy and Psychology at the University of Augsburg and has taught for many years in the fields of social theory, sociology of culture and qualitative methods. His recent publications include “‘Machine Down’: Making sense of human-computer interaction – Garfinkel’s early research on ELIZA at MIT in 1967-1968 and its contemporary relevance” (with Mlynář, Turowetz, and Rawls) (2023) and “Spirituality as Social Practice” (in German), De Gruyter: Berlin/Boston (2022).
Kathrin Friedrich is a Professor of Media Studies/Digital Media Culture at the University of Bonn. Previously, she was the scientific coordinator of the research college “SENSING: On the Knowledge of Sensitive Media” at the Brandenburg Center for Media Studies (ZeM). Her research focuses on the use of tracking in agriculture and medicine, as well as reality media such as virtual reality technology in psychology and performance.
Mathias Funk is Associate Professor in the Future Everyday group in the Department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). He has a background in Computer Science and a PhD in Electrical Engineering (from Eindhoven University of Technology). His research interests include methods and tools for designing with data, data-enabled design, Human-AI collaboration, and designing systems of smart things.
Tim Hector is a postdoctoral researcher at the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen, Germany. He is part of project B06, “Un-/desired Observation in Interaction: Smart Environments, Language, Body, and Senses in Private Households”. Tim finished his PhD in Applied Linguistics in April 2024, with a dissertation on linguistic practices used in dialogues with smart speakers. He holds a degree in German language and literature, specializing in linguistics. His research interests include media linguistics, conversation analysis, and human-machine interaction.
David Howes is Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University and an Adjunct Professor in the Faculty of Law at McGill University, Montreal. He is also Co-Director of the Concordia Centre for Sensory Studies. Howes is a legal anthropologist, a pioneer of the anthropology of the senses and a leading theorist in the interdisciplinary field of sensory studies. He is currently directing a project called ‘Explorations in Sensory Design’. Recent books include The Sensory Studies Manifesto (2022), Sensorial Investigations (2023) and Sensorium (2024)
Max Kanderske is a research assistant at the project “Navigation in online/offline spaces” within the Collaborative Research Centre “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen. His research interests include media geography, media history, navigational media, STS, and game studies.
Dennis Kirschsieper is a research assistant at the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen, Germany. He is part of project A05 “The Cooperative Creation of User Autonomy in the Context of the Ageing Society”. Dennis is working on a PhD on privacy and data protection. He holds a degree in sociology with minors in philosophy and psychology. His research interests include privacy, smart homes, telecare, telemedicine, and digital literacy.
Jochen Lange has been professor of “Educational Science with a focus on the didactics of subject teaching” at the University of Siegen since 2022. He has previously worked as a professor in Koblenz, Freiburg and Kassel. As part of the DFG project “The commercial development and testing of didactic objects”, he completed his doctorate in 2016 with an ethnographic thesis on the genesis of physics experiments that emerge from the education industry for use in the classroom. Current research deals with praxeological focuses on mediality, materiality and digitalization in the classroom.
Saadia Mirza is an anthropologist and architect whose work focuses on landscape studies, the history of science, sensory anthropology, and media studies, using methods such as landscape modeling, cartography, sound analysis, and mixed reality (AR/VR) formats. She has taught design, anthropology, and architecture in Pakistan, USA, and France. Her current research examines the social impact of sensing systems, climate modeling, and landscape simulation on perceptions of geological processes and environmental change. Her research is exhibited through immersive installations shown in Germany, France, and Austria, with an upcoming participation in the 15th Gwangju Biennale in South Korea.
Lorenza Mondada is Professor for linguistics at the University of Basel. Working on social interaction in ordinary, professional and institutional settings, within an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective, she focuses on video analysis and multimodality. Her research on how the situated and endogenous organization of social interaction draws on a diversity of multimodal resources, articulates language with gesture, gaze, body posture, body movements, objects manipulations as well as multisensorial practices involving vision, touch, taste and smell. She has extensively published in J. of Pragmatics, Discourse Studies, Language in Society, ROLSI, J. of Sociolinguistics, co-edited several collective books, as well as elaborated her approach of sensoriality in the book Sensing in Social Interaction (CUP, 2021).
Anne W. Rawls is a Professor of Interaction, Work, and Information, Univ. of Siegen, and Professor of Sociology, Bentley University. Focusing on structures of interaction and their relationship to social theory, she examines how expectations involving social inequality/disability and stigmatized social categories can structure interaction in ways that interfere with the achievement of social coherence. Taking an ethnomethodological and conversation analytic perspective her research has focused on Interaction Orders of Race and Disability, looking at ways in which marginalization has resulted in privileging social practices that exclude, while those embodied practices of exclusion remain invisible. Publishing extensively on social theory and inequality, the book Tacit Racism (with Waverly Duck, UCSB) explored how this interactional process works with regard to Race, while current research (with Derek Coates, UC Berkeley) explores Sighted expectations that pose barriers to Blind people.
Valérie Schafer has been a Professor in Contemporary European History at the C²DH (Centre for Contemporary and Digital History) at the University of Luxembourg since February 2018. She previously worked at the CNRS in France and is still an Associate Researcher at the Center for Internet and Society (CIS – CNRS UPR 2000). She specialises in the history of computing, telecommunications and data networks. Her main research interests are the history of the Internet and the Web, the history of European digital cultures and infrastructures, and born-digital heritage (especially Web archives).
Dominik Schrey is the scientific coordinator of the SFB 1187 “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen, Germany. Previously, he was a lecturer for digital media culture at the Universities of Passau and Freiburg. He has held research fellowships at the IFK in Vienna, Tongji University Shanghai, and Harvard University, and is the author of Analoge Nostalgie in der digitalen Medienkultur (Kadmos, 2017).
Philippe Sormani (PhD in Sociology) is a researcher engaging with Media of Praxeology I: Multisensory Mediality and Cooperative Practice (Project P01), and in particular the late Garfinkel’s insights on instructed action, embodied practices and perception (WP1 “Tutorial Archive”). Drawing on and developing science, technology and media studies, he has published on experimentation in and across different fields of activity, ranging from experimental physics (in Respecifying Lab Ethnography, 2014) to artistic experiments (in Practicing Art/Science, 2018). Currently, he is preparing a new book, bringing to bear reflexive video ethnography on information technology demonstrations.
Gunnar Stevens is Professor for Information Systems, especially IT Security, at the University of Siegen. He is also the Co-Director of the Institute for the digital consumption at the Bonn-Rhine-Sieg University of Applied Sciences. He has published more than 150 papers on human-computer-interaction and digital consumption. He leads several research projects in the field of digital consumption, among others in the fields of mobility, nutrition and housing, user-centered security, and data protection as well as consumer information systems for the IoT sector. His current research is on the impact on digital design and consumer practices.
Jürgen Streeck is a linguist and professor of communication studies, anthropology, and Germanic studies at the University of Texas at Austin. He is known for his work on gesture and multimodal interaction and has recently become involved in research on touch and communication between humans and non-human animals. Among Streeck’s books are Gesturecraft – The Manu-facture of Meaning (2009); Self-Making Man. A Day of Action, Life, and Language (2017); Embodied Interaction. Language and Body in the Material World (ed. with C. Goodwin and C.LeBaron, 2011); and Intercorporeality. Emerging Socialities in Interaction (ed. with C.Meyer and J.S. Jordan.
Niklas Strüver is a PhD candidate at the Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation” at Universität Siegen. He is part of project B06, “Un-/desired Observation in Interaction: Smart Environments, Language, Body, and Senses in Private Households”. His research is in the field of sociology of technology and his dissertation explores the sociotechnical relations of voice assistants. Niklas aims to inspect the voice assistant Alexa from multiple perspective, highlighting the social implications of technological and organizational decisions.
Hoa Mai Trần is a childhood pedagogue and educational scientist. She works as a research assistant at the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen, Germany. She is part of project B05 “(Early) Childhood and Smartphones”. In her PhD Project she explores the more-than-human interplay between children and digital games. Her general research areas are childhood studies, (digital/hybrid) ethnography, and qualitative methods, ethnography, digital media and digital childhoods, critical posthumanism and research ethics.
Nina ter Laan is a cultural anthropologist and religious studies scholar from the Netherlands. Her research focuses on artistic practices, politics of belonging, religion, migration, and gender in postcolonial settings of the Euro-Mediterranean zone. Since November 2020, she has been a postdoctoral researcher in the SFB “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Cologne, examining migration and memory practices in the Rif region of northern Morocco through art, music, and materiality. She holds a Ph.D. from Radboud University, with a dissertation on the political use of contemporary Islamic music in Morocco. Her first postdoctoral research at Utrecht University explored the Islamic emigration (hijra) of Dutch and Flemish Muslim women to Morocco, revealing complex (post)colonial dynamics of religion, race, gender, and social class. Nina integrates material culture and artistic practices with collaborative research methods and has taught at various universities and published in journals such as Religion, Contemporary Islam, and HAU.
Carla Tiefenbacher is a research assistant in the CRC “Media of Co-operation” at the University of Cologne, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology. Her PhD project explores infrastructures of Spanish religious and military presence in the Spanish-Moroccan borderlands. Carla’s research interests include Science and Technology Studies (STS), memory and heritage studies, religious anthropology and security studies.
Astrid Vogelpohl (Diplom, media education) is a media educator, video journalist, editor, and lecturer. She has made numerous films in the fields of culture, education, and science, she regularly conducts workshops on multimedia and digital storytelling. Since 2016 she is part of the camera ethnographic team in the project B05 “Early Childhood and Smartphone“ at the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen, Germany. She has just defended her doctoral thesis entitled “This is me – camera ethnographic observations in digital childhoods”.
Venue
University of Siegen
Campus Unteres Schloss
US-S 001 / 002
Obergraben 25
57072 Siegen