How is urban mobility being transformed by bike-sharing, e-scooters, and app-based mobility services? And who shapes the conditions under which shared micromobility operates in cities?

The workshop “Shared Micromobility – Who’s Taking Charge?” will address these questions on 17 and 18 September 2026 in Cologne. The event is organized by project A03 “Navigation in Online/Offline Spaces”.

The programme for the two-day workshop is now available online.

→ To the event

→ Register here

The workshop focuses on the infrastructures, technologies, data flows, and actors that enable shared micromobility. It also explores how different people experience these mobility services and which perspectives, needs, and interests are made visible or remain overlooked.

The observations and discussions emerging from the workshop will be documented collaboratively with artists and designers and will contribute to a publicly accessible report on the “Seams” of shared mobility in Cologne and its points of connection, friction, disruption, and transition.

The SFB cordially invites you to the defense of Niklas Strüver’s doctoral thesis.

Monday, July 27, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. in Room AH-A 217/18.

During the defense, the findings of his dissertation will be presented to the examination committee and academically defended. The title of his dissertation is “Speaking on behalf of the periphery: Third-party relationships in Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem” and it examines the developmental dynamics of the voice assistant Alexa from the perspectives of infrastructure and platform theory. Drawing on the four articles presented, the dissertation explores how Alexa functions as an infrastructure and platform for third-party providers in business and academia, and what sociotechnical power imbalances arise in the process. This analysis allows for an examination of the social relationships that Amazon, as the manufacturer, enters into with complementary providers on the periphery of the platform. Through various empirical approaches, it is possible, despite the usual secrecy maintained by large corporations, to gain insight into the development of technologies that are present in the everyday lives of many people.

It will be conducted in German and supervised by the two examiners, Dagmar Hoffmann and Armin Beverungen.

Niklas Strüver (M.A.) ist wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter im Projekt B06 („Un/erbetene Beobachtung in Interaktion“) und Doktorand am SFB 1187 „Medien der Kooperation“. Er studierte Soziologie mit einem Schwerpunkt auf Techniksoziologie an der RWTH Aachen und schloss dort den Master of Arts ab. Seine Forschungsschwerpunkte liegen u.a. in den Bereichen Techniksoziologie, Science and Technology Studies sowie Platform Studies.

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. 

→ Check out the program and register now

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.

Venue

University of Siegen
Campus Unteres Schloss
US-S 001 / 002
Obergraben 25
57072 Siegen

We are delighted to announce the programme for the forthcoming Autumn School, Synthetic Social Media: Studying Platform-Embedded AI, taking place at the University of Siegen, 22–25 September.

→ check out the program

→ Register here 

The programme is organised around three themes: AI Slop / Slopification (Day 1), Chatbot / Appification (Day 2), and Persona / Affective Infrastructure (Day 3), featuring presentations by Stijn Peeters, Marloes Geboers, Salvatore Romano, Carine Roos, Giorgia Arbuti, Natalia Stanusch, Tanja Sihvonen, Jimmy Mäkelä, Natalia Sánchez-Querubín, Nuppu Pelevina, Lilli Sihvonen, Elena Pilipets, and Marcus Bösch.

The three themes are brought into conversation through keynotes by Gabriele De Seta, Esther Weltevrede, Sara Messelaar Hammerschmidt, and Carolin Gerlitz, followed by collaborative method-mapping workshops in breakout groups supported by data designers Ángeles Briones and Riccardo Ventura.

Reflecting on synthetic/human-machine co-created data, participants will brainstorm ways to combine different methodological pathways, analytical techniques, and research tools to study platform-embedded AI through qualitative inquiry and critical technical practice. The workshops integrate hands-on data exploration and visual mapping on Miro boards, using methodological prototyping as a mode of inquiry. Each workshop is tailored to the day’s theme, exploring questions of field access/data collection, research tool inscriptions, sense-making/sensing, methodological frictions, and the ethical challenges posed by synthetic data and AI-mediated environments. The specific affordances of the media phenomena at hand are central. Our main interest is to explore how these affordances inform the method(s).

The Autumn School concludes (on Day 4) with a collective reflection on the outcomes of the method mapping workshops, bringing together the insights and questions that emerged over the course of the programme.

Venue

Universität Siegen | Campus Herrengarten 

AH-A 217/18 | Herrengarten 3 | 57072 Siegen

Studying Media as an Ongoing Accomplishment

We are excited to invite you to this summer’s Lecture Series on “Cooperative Methodologies – Studying Sensory Media and AI”. Inspired by Simon Garfinkel’s notion of “ongoing accomplishment”, we invited eight guest speakers to explore research methods and situations methodologically.

→ Register here

About the lecture series

The lecture series “Cooperative Methodologies – Studying Sensory Media and AI” addresses methodological problems that emerge from studying media as an “ongoing accomplishment” (Garfinkel). The central premise is that methods cannot be treated as external instruments applied to pre-given objects. Rather, research situations are constituted through the entanglement of media and tools, technical and human sensing, and research practices. Methodological reflection thus focuses on the conditions under which knowledge is cooperatively produced and problematised.

A key challenge is the multiple situatedness of digital and sensor-based media. Practices are locally embedded yet generate and connect multiple situations through infrastructural distribution, real-time synchronization, and scalability. Micro-situations must therefore be analyzed in relation to infrastructures of sensing and sense-making, data publics and stakeholder constellations, and the interplay of human perception with technical sensor systems. This requires methodological designs that combine approaches capable of tracing cross-scale relations and controversies.

Furthermore, the lecture series is concerned with the methodological status of digital tools and AI systems within research practice. Tools for collecting, sharing, analysing, and visualising data inscribe their own ordering capacities into research. With sensor data and AI outputs, these effects intensify: classifications, recommendations, and model biases shape what can be observed, archived, and interpreted. The series situates these dynamics within debates on performativity, inscriptions, bias, and interface methods, while emphasizing that they emerge in entangled sensory research practices involving human and non-human agencies.

Finally, the lecture series inquires into how methodological choices distribute attention and agency: they determine which experiences count as data, which forms of sensing become legible, and which publics are addressed and which are excluded. Accordingly, the series approaches methods as political arrangements that govern participation in knowledge-making – asking whose voices enter datasets and models, whose interpretations shape analytic pipelines, and whose concerns remain unaccounted for. Cooperative methodology may require making conflicts over categories, metrics, and evidentiary standards explicit, accountable, and revisable.

Lectures & Speakers

We invited eight international guest speakers from media studies, social science, economics, informatics, linguistics, science and technology studies as well as art and activism. They come from the Netherlands, Finland, Iran, USA, Germany and Great Britain. 

Event Details

• Dates: April 15 – July 8, 2026
• Location: University of Siegen, Herrengarten 3, Room: AH-A 217/18
• Streaming: via Webex
• Time: Wednesdays, 2:15 AM – 3:45 PM CET

How to Register

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

Contact

info[æt]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de

Thank you, and we hope to see you there!

The Spring School MEDIA EXTRACTIVISM explores, at the intersection of media and cultural studies and activism, how “raw materials” are extracted, used, constructed, imagined, and discursively negotiated. In doing so, it reflects on the complex interweaving of materiality, media representation, imagination, and the societal attribution of meaning.

• What images, narratives, and frames shape public perceptions of raw materials, energy sources, or sustainable alternatives?
• How do journalistic, social, and artistic formats portray the fragility and urgency of resources, as well as their creative power of healing and care?
• Which extractive regimes do algorithmic and cloud-based systems generate or perpetuate?
• How do we narrate the water, land use, and energy conflicts associated with AI and cloud computing?
• Where can we mobilize and practice resistance against extractive violence in our everyday lives?

The Spring School invites scholars, activists, and journalists to explore theoretical and empirical approaches to resources as phenomena of media culture. Within the framework of the Spring School, we aim not only to analyze discourses and representations but also to conceive new performative and participatory communication formats. The goal is to connect scholarly perspectives with climate policy action, thereby providing new impetus for a critical analysis of media-driven extraction that critically expands the public understanding of sustainability and, in light of the urgency to act, finds ways to address the climate catastrophe.

We look forward to lectures and workshops with Migration Audio Archive, Jakob Claus, Gerko Egert, Azadeh Ganjeh, Matthias Grotkopp, Mariette Kesting, Frederike Lange, Petra Löffler, Julia Nitschke, Maike Reinerth, Rémi Willemin, and others.

Studierende, Lehrende und ihre Seminargruppen sind – etwa im Rahmen von Exkursionen – herzlich willkommen, an unserer Media Climate Justice Spring School no. 3 in Bochum teilzunehmen. Infos und Anmeldung unter: mail@mediaclimatejustice.org

by Tahereh Aboofazeli & Arjang Omrani

The Affect of a Torn Carpet

A 12-meter handwoven carpet, relatively intact, torn into pieces and hung on the exhibition wall.

At first glance, it provokes feelings of pity and protest. Many visitors repeatedly confront us with the question: “Why did you tear the carpet apart?”

We responded with a question in return: “Why are you moved by its tearing?”

In mourning the loss of a handcrafted object and the hard labor of a weaver, the question arises: Whose labor has been lost? Which weaver?

Before the carpet was torn, what presence or share did that unknown weaver have in the moments of delight and admiration for its beauty-

in its buying and selling,

in its being touched, experienced, and cared for?

For most of our audience, this was the first reflective encounter with the anonymity of the weaver, revealing the depth of her distance from the system of production, commerce, and aesthetics that surrounds the carpet.

The stories of anonymous weavers – speaking of their hatred for the carpet, scattered among the torn pieces, imbue the visual pleasure drawn from the colorful, patterned world of the carpet market with a sense of shame.

It was the first encounter with the dissensus we seek to bring to the scene and share with the public: the space between the reality that exists within the current regime of carpet production and trade, and the reality we believe ought to exist.

Confronting culture and power

Drawing on the conceptual framework of shared anthropology, our project positions itself at the intersection of critical public anthropology and critical public pedagogy. These fields share a commitment to critically conscious, engaged, and animating practices that intervene in the public domain, confronting the contested role of culture in the production, distribution, and regulation of power. Within this framework, knowledge is conceived as co-authored—not produced by the anthropologist alone, but generated through processes of “sharing-the-anthropology.”

This approach treats multimodal narratives and artistic forms not as mere “objects” or “outputs” of research but as modes of inquiry—as ways of practicing knowledge, mediating it, and circulating it beyond academic enclaves. Such circulation is not only vital for making scholarly insights publicly accessible and open to critique; it is also crucial for connecting collaborators within the project—here, the weavers—to the networks of knowledge and power that typically exclude them. In this sense, the anthropologist’s role becomes one of mediating and curating these encounters, working to narrow structural distances rather than to reproduce them.

The Weaving Memories project, defined from the outset as an intervention in the handmade carpet production regime, thus seeks not only to render visible the conditions of labor but to unsettle its epistemic hierarchies: to create alternative spaces where weavers’ knowledge, narratives, and aesthetic decisions can reconfigure the terms through which carpets—and their makers—are understood.

Emergence of a New Literacy

The audience’s encounter, however, is not limited to confronting the anonymity and invisibility of the weaver. In Weaving Memories, we intervened in the relationship between the weaver and the carpet by asking: What would happen if, instead of pre-designed, commissioned patterns, one were to weave one’s own narratives and ideas? The exhibition staged the public’s encounter with precisely this intervention: What if that anonymous weaver had woven her own carpet?

After spending nearly an hour in the exhibition in Siegen and looking closely at the carpets, one visitor remarked: “I feel that engaging with these carpets—and with what they bring forth—requires a new kind of literacy, one that I must first learn by immersing myself among them and then slowly acquire in order to relate to them.”

In our view, the audience’s presence in the exhibition is not merely an encounter with the weaver and her narrative, but an encounter with a mode of narrating and an aesthetic form through which she has chosen to intertwine her knowledge of life and of weaving. It is an encounter with a new literacy and discourse introduced by the weaver herself.

About the exhibition

The exhibition “WE ARE NOT CARPETS: I tell you my story” took place from October 6 to 31, 2025, at the poool art space in Siegen. The exhibition was curated by Tahereh Aboofazeli (University of Cologne) and Arjang Omrani (Ghent University) in cooperation with the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1187) “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen.

Five artist weavers from the North Khorasan region of Iran participated in the exhibition, showcasing eight life-size carpets and sharing their deeply personal stories. The presented carpets invited visitors to reflect on the hidden stories and cultural connections that have shaped the production and meaning of carpets. The exhibition also encouraged visitors to engage with the trajectory of marginalisation and exploitation of those who weave, shedding light on the colonial and capitalist entanglements of exploitation that continue to have an impact today.

The presented carpets are the result of the collaborative research project “Weaving Memories” by Tahereh Aboofazeli (University of Cologne) and Arjang Omrani (Ghent University). Ten artist weavers from this region have participated in the „Weaving Memories“ project. Among those, the five artist weavers that have taken part in the installation in Siegen were Masoumeh Zolfaghari, Asieh Davari, Saheb Jamal Rahimi, Taqan Beik Barzin and Zohreh Parvin, with Zoleikha Davari providing additional support with stabilizing weaving work.

Challenges and affordances of doing media research with generative AI

This series explores the challenges and affordances of doing media research with generative AI. AI is not only a subject of media studies, but deployed to collect data, interpret texts, perform mult-modal analysis, and assist writing. But what happens when prompts, models, and training data enter the methodological core of media studies? On what grounds can we cooperate with AI in research? The seminar series Synthetic Methods takes these questions as its point of departure. It explores current practices, tools, approaches and issues of synthetic methods, asking how AI participates in producing, mediating, and interpreting knowledge.

In recent years, the tools and infrastructures of generative AI—large language models, multimodal systems, and computer-vision pipelines—have begun to blur the boundaries between data collection, analysis, and interpretation. AI does not simply assist researchers in automating tasks; it brings in its own epistemic logics, biases, and inscriptions. Text and image generation models suggest categories, segment data, or simulate field interactions. They act as synthetic interlocutors in ethnographic work, as co-coders in qualitative analysis, or as analytical lenses in cultural analytics. The series engages with these developments hands-on and conceptually, examining what it means to “do research with AI.”

At the centre of the series lies an interest in the distributed accomplishment of discovery between humans and AI. Instead of handing analytical capacity entirely to computational systems, we will explore how reasoning, interpretation, and sense-making can emerge collaboratively across human and AI agencies. Generative models may extend perception and imagination, but they also depend on human intervention, interpretation, and evaluative judgment. The sessions thus foreground research as a shared practice of translation and negotiation, where human reflexivity and AI inference together shape what counts as evidence, relevance, and insight. This distributed perspective opens the space to examine the affordances, issues, and evaluative criteria that govern scholarship when AI becomes part of the epistemic process: How can we maintain reflexive, critical and ethical orientations while experimenting with new, mixed agencies of knowing?

Over the course of the semester, the series will address a range of perspectives and practices. An initial session on infrastructures and AI ethics situates large-scale models within the political economies of cloud computing, highlighting questions of privacy, transparency, and data provenance. Subsequent meetings explore how AI reshapes established methodological domains: as an assistant in qualitative analysis and ethnography, as a writing companion and reflective mirror in academic text production, and as a tool for analyzing visual and multimodal materials. Participants will experiment with both commercial and locally hosted models, comparing their capacities and constraints.

Specific attention will be given to the question if and how synthetic methods require specific modes and practices of methodological reflexivity. The series does not treat models as neutral instruments but as infrastructures with their own histories, biases, and aesthetics. Engaging with generative systems thus becomes an exercise in distributed reflexivity: models, prompts, and humans co-produce insight. This distributed agency raises fundamental questions of authorship, responsibility, and transparency that reach beyond technical documentation. To “work synthetically” is to navigate this entanglement without surrendering critical distance—to cultivate a mode of inquiry that remains aware of its own mediations.

Schedule
22.10. Infrastructure and synthetic reasoning – Understanding beyond AI with Hinau Firdaus and Amita Kapoor

05.11. AI for Ethnographic Analysis

19.11. Writing with AI with Sergei Pashakhin

3.12. System Prompts with Marcus Burkhardt & Hendrik Bender

17.12. Voice of Machine Theft with Rosa Menkman und David Gauthier

14.01. Metabolic Images and Method Maps with Elena Pilipets

Location

All lectures take place on-site in Siegen with a hybrid setting. You can register to get the Webex-link and join sessions online.

University Siegen
room: AH-A 217/18
Herrengarten 3
57072 Siegen

Registration

Please register via email to info[æt]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de

Organisation

The series is organized by INF project “Infrastructures for Collaborative Sensory RDM Practices” in collaboration with Carolin Gerlitz, Elena Pilipets, Dominik Schrey, Sara Messelaar Hammerschmidt, Sergei Pashakhin & Hina Firdaus.