News
Networking, workshops and coaching sessions: As part of equal opportunities service in the CRC we host and offer a variety of formats ranging from networking events, coaching sessions and workshops to a comeback of our “Gender & Diversity Lunch”.
In the past winter, we invited Dr. Claudia Neusüß with a thought-provoking workshop on “Career Development and Negotiation Techniques”, which was the result of a valuable cooperation with the Equal Opportunities Office. Our PhD candidates became part of the supportive “Online Coworking Community” initiated by Dr. Anna Maria Beck and benefitted from an inspiring writing workshop conducted by [schreibzentrum.berlin]. Furthermore, we provided our female members individual coaching sessions on career development.
We started into the summer with a talk and discussion round with Dr. Iuditha Balint, director of the “Fritz-Hüser-Institut für Literatur und Kultur der Arbeitswelt”, which became the kick-off event for this summer’s “Gender & Diversity Lunch” series, formely known as “Gender Lunch”. In the following month we welcomed Jun.-Prof. Dr. Cécile Stehrenberger and are looking forward to our next guests, Prof. Dr. Julia Bee and Dr. Simone Pfeifer, who will share their experiences around the topics of gender equality, diversity as well as reconciling academia and family. The “Gender & Diversity Lunch” is a collaborative format with the CRC 1472 “Transformations of the Popular”. Joining forces, we seek to facilitate networking between CRC members and individuals from variuous fields with different biographical backgrounds.
In June, we were very happy to host the workshop “Critical Whitness – Perspectives and Positioning for Everyday University Life” facilitated by KARFI – Black Collective for Empowerment and Racism-Critical Education. The educational collective is an association of three Black women, offering workshops, lectures, and support on working critically on racism.
We are very much looking forward to learning and growing with, through and from one another.
You find more about our Equal Opportunities Services here.
“Memory under Fire” focuses on data and archiving practices in times of war and conflict. With Ukraine as a focal point, we explore the dynamics of information disorder in our platform saturated media sphere. Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine has brought innumerable deaths and destruction in the physical sphere, and Russia’s aggression also continues in the digital space, where countless pieces of disinformation, hate speech and propaganda are spread. Additionally, the digital media dynamics of this war have been put front and centre: some call it ‘the first TikTok war’, others argue that Volodimir Zelenskiy and his country invented new ways to fight on the digital battlefield. Russia’s invasion and the ensuing ongoing war highlights both digital warfare and the many data practices that participate in, critique, document, and archive this war.
This current situation sheds light on the need to document and archive war experiences and war crimes for future researchers and generations. This is particularly relevant for both countering disinformation practices and preserving data and access to it digitally, when physical archival infrastructures are being destroyed.
For our event series, we host speakers from the fields of academia and praxis (e.g. Center for Urban History in Lviv, Bellingcat, Mnemonic, University of Amsterdam, Simon Fraser University, Underdog the Unlawyers and other institutions and fields of praxis) to discuss how this war is influenced by and changing our digital media sphere.
The first event “Archiving in Times of Crisis: Academic Perspectives” on May 23th explored data archiving and creative resistance practices in Ukraine and its diaspora featuring Taras Nazaruk from the Center for Urban History in Lviv and Kateryna Iakovlenko from the Institute of Human Sciences in Vienna.
The second event “Archiving in Times of Crisis: Practitioners’ Perspectives” on June 13th focuses on archiving war and human rights violations from the critical data practice perspectives in the fields of journalism and NGOs. We will host Charlotte Godart, investigator and lead of the Global Authentication Project at Bellingcat, Dia Kayyali, Associate Director of Advocacy at Mnemonic, and Olga Lubiv, Analyst at Underdog the Unlawyers, Kyiv, Ukraine.
The third event „Russian Disinformation“ on June 27th will present research perspectives from Ukrainian scholars and practitioners on Russian disinformation practices and their implications. We will welcome as guests: Karyna Lazaruk, Visual Communication Specialist and Media Activist, Institute of Mass Information, Ukraine, and Marc Tuters, Assistant Professor, University of Amsterdam, Svitlana Matviyenko, Assistant Professor, Simon Fraser University and Oleksiy Radynski, Filmmaker and Writer.
We invite the public to participate in the series of events by registering via migle.bareikyte[æt]uni-siegen.de or yarden.skop[æt]uni-siegen.de for a Zoom link.
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50 Jahre Universität Siegen, 50 Jahre Forschung. Begleitet von Live-Musik konnten sich Besucher*innen des Fests der „Offene Uni“ am letzten Samstag die Sonderforschungsbereiche 1187 „Medien der Kooperation“ und 1472 „Transformationen des Populären“ der Universität Siegen kennenlernen. Unter dem gemeinsamen Thema „Unsere digitale Gegenwart: neue Formen des Populären und der Kooperation“ gaben vier unserer Teilprojekte im sonnenbeschienenen Hof des Unteren Schlosses Einblick in die Vielfalt der Medien der Kooperation.
Neben dem Gespräch mit unseren Forschenden konnten Besucher*innen mit vergangenen und aktuellen Chatbots interagieren und mehr über die Forschung zu synthetischen Akteuren erfahren, die in unserem Teilprojekts B08 „Agentic Media: Formen der Semi-Autonomie“ erfolgt. Wie viel Alexa mithört und versteht, konnten Besucher*innen wiederum vom Teilprojekt B06 „Un/erbetene Beobachtung in Interaktion: „Intelligente Persönliche Assistenten“ (IPA)“ erfahren. Früh übte es sich beim Stand von Projekt B05, welches die Interaktion von Babys und Kindern zusammen mit den Eltern erforscht. Über kleine Filme und Fotos zeigte das Projekt B05 „Frühe Kindheit und Smartphone. Familiäre Interaktionsordnung, Lernprozesse und Kooperation“, wie Kleinkinder mit digitalen Geräten umgehen. Digitale Medien spielen auch in der Medizin eine wichtige Rolle. Unser Projekt A06 „Visuell integrierte klinische Kooperation“ präsentierte den selbstentwickelten Prototypen, der die Symptome von Bandscheibenproblemen zeigt.
Wir hoffen, dass wir allen Besucher*innen einen Eindruck davon vermitteln konnten, auf welcher breiten Front sich digitale Medien als kooperative Werkzeuge, Plattformen und Infrastrukturen zeigen und danken für das Interesse und die anregenden Gespräche.
Our lecture series on “Testing Infrastructures” starts tomorrow.
From QR codes used to verify COVID-19 vaccination status’ to cloud software used to train machine learning models, infrastructures of testing are proliferating. Whilst the infrastructures themselves come in different forms – from ‘off the shelf’ systems to tailor-made technologies – they all have a capacity to generate specific ‘test situations’ involving an array of different actors from ‘ghost’ workers to python scripts. An increasing reliance on digital platforms, protocols, tools, and procedures has led to a redistribution of testing itself: not just where testing takes place, and who performs the testing, but who has access to, and control over, mechanisms for testing, test protocols and of course, test results. In this lecture series, we focus on the practices making up the test infrastructures and explore different perspectives to make sense of the realities enacted by testing.
Our exploration of test practices is interwoven with the search for test media that bind actors together or create barriers; that enable cooperation or declare it impossible. Thus, our guest lecturers will reflect on a wide range of questions regarding ‘testing infrastructures’: How do testing infrastructures engender the construction of specific testing routines and practices? What kinds of affective experiences, reactions, and responses are generated through testing? How do testing infrastructures fade into the background, pointing to a tapestry of maintenance and repair practices? Lastly, what are the ways in which we can evaluate the role of digital infrastructures more broadly?
What novel test methods can be developed and actually ‘tested’ to gain a better understanding of how infrastructures work?
The lecture series is organized by the Collaborative Research Center (SFB 1187) “Media of Cooperation”.
Contact: Dr. Johannes Schick (johannes.schick[æt]uni-siegen.de)
What do images from the web and social media connected to Covid-19 testing tell us about issues, big and small, in the world? And how can they be repurposed for the study of testing situations?
In the hands-on workshop “Test Society/Covid-19” international partakers will explore how images on Twitter can be used to account for the unfolding of issues across various scales, ranging from everyday moments to media outrage provoking events. The workshop is hosted by Media of Cooperation and will take place on 16th and 17th of December 2021.
As it builds on previous workshops at the Universities of Warwick, Amsterdam and St. Gallen, the workshop will offer researchers in STS, media studies and associated fields an opportunity to engage in and reflect on interpretative analysis of visual data in an interdisciplinary set-up crossing social, design and data-intensive methods. This event is organised by Noortje Marres (University of Warwick), Liliana Bounegru (King’s College London), Gabriele Colombo (Politecnico di Milano), Carolin Gerlitz (University of Siegen), Jonathan Gray (King’s College London).
More information can be found here.
How and why did people come to deny the materiality of the digital? What can we learn by recovering it? What if we rethink digital materialities as ongoing cooperative accomplishments?
From December 1–3 2021 historians, media theorists and information scholars come together for the online conference “Digital Matters” to examine socio-material constituents of digital systems and artifacts. Tackling the presupposition of digital immateriality as a misconception but at the same time as a productive site for interdisciplinary scholarly inquiry into media and data practices, the conference counters the idea of disembodied algorithms floating rhetorically in an ethereal cloud of big data. With a keynote lecture by Jonathan Sterne (McGill University) titled “Some Species of Materiality”, six moderated sessions and twelve international speakers, the conference promises a deep dive into digital matters and (im)materialities.
Conceptualized as an online conference with hybrid elements, most speakers will partake online with the organizers and several others coming together onsite in Siegen.
The conference is organized by Thomas Haigh (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee & Siegen University), Valérie Schafer (University of Luxembourg), Axel Volmar (Siegen University) and Sebastian Giessmann (Siegen University). The event is part of the CRC projects A01 and A02.
For more information see:
https://www.mediacoop.uni-siegen.de/en/events/conference-digital-matters-a01/
Once again scholars come together in the CRC annual conference to share their research. This year’s conference “Re-Situating Learning: Making Sense of Data, Media and Dis/Unities of Learning Practices” is all about learning. This is no coincidence as it marks the 30th anniversary of Jean Lave’s and Etienne Wenger’s book “Situated Learning”. Since its release, the way of learning as a social practice has changed dramatically. Mostly due the digitization of media, which brought new concepts of learning and, thus, establishing new communities of practice that themselves are characterized by ephemerality and fluidity as fragmented, graduated and networked publics. Organized by the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” the conference is planning to reexamine the relations between learning and digital media from various angles. International keynote speakers will present their findings on how the digital era has changed the social practice of learning. This involves examinations ranging from practices of un-learning certain outdated methods, over human interactions with machines to babies falling asleep.
The annual conference takes place on 25–29 October 2021. It is structured in an evening event opening the conference with a keynote by Jean Lave, and four thematic panels including keynotes around the topics “Intercorporeality and Learning” (Keynote: Thomas Alkemeyer), “Decolonizing Learning, Rethinking Research” (Keynote: Koen Leurs), “Cross-Community Learning” (Keynote: Gerhard Fischer) and “Human-Machine-Learning” (Keynote: Mercedes Bunz).
For more information and a detailed program, please see the conference website.
How are learning and digital media connected? And how are digital media shaping practices of learning? Nowadays many aspects of life aren’t imaginable anymore without digital media, including the area of learning. This winter’s lecture series of the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) “Media of Cooperation” focuses on “Learning (in) Digital Media”.
Processes of learning are a locus of organization, stabilization as well as perturbation of societal structures. Digital media transformed the parameters of communal practice and participation leading to re-situate practices of learning into settings that are infrastructurally stabilized, yet locally and socially distributed. This established new communities of practice. Furthermore, conventional notions of learning are being challenged by recent interest in machine learning in the field of artificial intelligence. The changing technologies of cooperation, instruction, and learning are also affecting the conditions of collaboration in social and cultural realms, challenging or reinforcing power asymmetries. It becomes more and more difficult to trace hierarchies of knowledge and modes of political power within techniques and technologies of learning and cooperation. Yet the actual process of learning remains a communal practice, in which results of interaction cannot be fully predetermined.
The CRC’s lecture series aims at examining the cooperative production of “learning” as a media and data practice in its different aspects: from the learning subjects, organizations and data practices involved in learning processes to self-learning systems and artificial intelligence. We invited several scholars from different fields of research to inquire the practices and concepts of cooperative learning and learning in cooperation from various perspectives.
12.10.2021 Rainer Mühlhoff: “Human-Aided Artificial Intelligence: Machinic capture of human labor in contemporary media culture”
19.10.2021 Katharina Rohlfing: “Scaffolding and monitoring: Aspects of learning in the social design of explainable AI systems”
02.11.2021 Inga Gryl, Helena Atteneder: “Towards a maturity-oriented education on the algorithms behind geomedia technologies”
09.11.2021 Petra Missomelius: “’Digital education” and the IT industry”
16.11.2021 Niels Kerssens: “Governed by edtech? Valuing educational autonomy in a platform society”
23.11.2021 Gabriele Gramelsberger: “Collaborating with machines: Researchers Meet ML-Algorithms”
30.11.2021 Florian Jaton: “On ground truths, biases, and morality in machine learning design and application”
14.12.2021 Jen Ross: “Speculative approaches, cultures of surveillance, and digital futures in higher education”
18.01.2022 Caroline Sinders: “Feminist Data Set”
01.02.2022 M. Beatrice Fazi: “Causality and the Future of Deep Learning”
The lecture series takes place as a hybrid event with on-site participation and online access. The zoom link for the lecture will be made available in good time via the SFB’s mailing list. Guests can register with Damaris Lehmann by email. Send an email
Lecture Series 2021 (Download)
The CRC “Media of Cooperation” invites international researchers to its fourth annual conference “Data Practices: Recorded, Provoked, Invented” from October 24 to 26. The conference addresses the contemporary challenges of praxeological media research in distributed digital infrastructures in six thematic sections. What constitutes a data practice and how are digital media technologies reconfiguring our understanding of practices in general? Autonomously acting media, distributed digital infrastructures and sensor-based media environments challenge the conditions of accounting for data practices both theoretically and empirically. Which forms of cooperation are constituted in, and by, data practices? What are the historical conditions of the possibility of current data practices? And how are human and nonhuman agencies distributed and interrelated in data-saturated environments? These and other questions are explored in a series of interdisciplinary contributions ranging from theoretical and historical reflections over empirical-ethnographic studies to design interventions.
Two keynote lectures by Celia Lury (University of Warwick) and David Ribes (University of Washington, CRC Mercator fellow 2019) will stimulate a broader discussion. Additionally, the first results of a long-term project to digitalize and visually interface the scientific estate of Harold Garfinkel will be presented by Andreas Mertgens and Patrick Sahle.
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