→ read the editorial introduction

Mediengeographie: Handbuch für Wissenschaft und Studium (Media Geographies: Handbook für Research and Study) 

by Tristan Thielmann (Universität Siegen, SFB) and Max Kanderske (SFB)

The field of media geography is situated at the intersection of media studies and human geography. The aim of this handbook is to trace the development of media geography and to provide a comprehensive overview of the current field of research—ranging from the geography of books to the geography of film and video games, and on to the geography of the Internet, smartphones, and AI.

→ to the book

About the book

The Internet of Things, Big Data, drone media, artificial intelligence, mobile GIS, and sensorized life: geodata are increasingly shaping our everyday lives and academic discourse. Published by Nomos, this handbook provides a comprehensive overview of current research questions emerging at the intersection of geography and media. On the one hand, it offers subject-oriented overview articles; on the other, it brings together programmatic contributions that have proven influential and forward-looking for the field. Contributors include Bruno Latour, Tim Ingold, Karen Caplan, Sarah Pink, Mark Andrejevic, James Ash, and Jessica McLean. An overview is provided in the introduction, which is available via academia.edu.

The work of Collaborative Research Centre 1187 “Media of Cooperation” is reflected in several contributions to the handbook: As head of project P04 “Precision Farming: Co-operative Practices of Virtual Fencing”, Tristan Thielmann examines the field of digital animal geographies; Sebastian Gießmann, head of project A01 “Digital-Networked Media between Specialization and Universalization”, traces the historical development of internet geography; and Max Kanderske, research associate in project A03 “Navigation in Online/Offline Spaces”, provides an introduction to the practices and discourses of digital real-time geography.

Further information can be found in the interview with the editors.

University members will soon have access to the digital edition of the handbook via inlibra.

About the authors

Tristan Thielmann is Professor of Science, Technology and Media Studies at the University of Siegen and Deputy Spokesperson of CRC 1187 “Media of Cooperation.” He is also the principal investigator of the projects A03 – Navigation in Online/Offline Spaces and P04 – Precision Farming: Co-operative Practices of Virtual Fencing. His research focuses on media geographies, media and technology history, navigation studies, and cultural cartographies. His areas of interest also include ethnomethodologies and technomethodologies, as well as the study of media and technologies in spatial and social contexts.

Max Kanderske is a research associate in project A03 “Navigation in Online/Offline Spaces” at the Siegen CRC “Media of Cooperation.” Beyond navigation studies, his research interests include sensor-mediated environments and digital game spaces. He is also co-editor of the Game Studies journal “Spiel|Formen.”

The project B09, “Bicycle Media: Collaborative Mobility Media,” led by Julia Bee, has recently set up a Wikipedia account, on which they have now published an article about bicycle feminism.

→ read the article

Extract from the article

“Bicycle feminism refers to feminist perspectives on bicycle mobility, transportation infrastructure, and bicycle culture. Bicycle feminist perspectives view the bicycle and cycling as a means of feminist self-empowerment. They focus in particular on gender-specific experiences related to issues of safety and freedom of movement in road traffic, as well as the historical overlap between bicycles (and cycling) and feminism.”

If you’re interested in learning more about this topic, we recommend attending the project’s annual conference on September 17 and 18 in Bochum. More information can be found here.

About the Working Paper Series

The Working Paper Series of SFB 1187 “Media of Cooperation” brings together current contributions from the field of interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary media research. The SFB Working Paper Series offers the opportunity for pre-publication and rapid dissemination of research work currently being carried out at the SFB or related to it. The aim of the series is to make SFB research accessible to a broader research community. Publication in the Working Paper Series does not preclude the publication of revised versions of the same contribution in other journals. Contributions from postdocs and established researchers are welcome. The series is intended as a publication forum for the researchers represented in the SFB, their projects, and their ongoing research. Contributions are published in open access and in a limited print edition. If you would like to publish an article in the Working Paper Series, please submit your topic proposal in the form of an abstract (max. 300 words) together with a short CV (max. 50 words). For manuscript submission, please refer to our styleguide.

Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) – Project number 262513311 – SFB 1187. Editorial responsibility: Karina Kirsten, University of Siegen & SFB 1187 Media of Cooperation.

About the Book

Cash or card? Or perhaps an app or blockchain? Sebastian Gießmann’s fast-paced history of the credit card takes us into the hidden worlds of digital payments. For the first time, it reveals how our digital present in North America began with a small plastic card, what magnetic stripes and chips actually mean, and how Europe could one day become a leader in digital payments. Gießmann elegantly guides readers into the secret inner workings of banks, credit card organizations, and computerized high-tech security. He acknowledges the everyday nature of transactions as well as the absurd “true crimes” of credit card fraud. The Credit Card Book explores the truth behind advertising slogans, company logos, and TV commercials. How we pay is political. Social participation and difference, consumption, financial surveillance, the future of cash: nothing less than our economic identity is at stake in digital payments.

“A brilliant study in media and cultural studies—methodologically groundbreaking and empirically rigorous.” – Anna Echterhölter

„Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship: New Communities of Practice and Enskilment“

von Marcello Múscari, Ehler, Voss, Martin, Zillinger

What role do transnational communities and techniques play in knowledge acquisition, and to what extent are such practices communicated, learned, and transformed worldwide? This question is explored in an article by our members Ehler Voss and Martin Zillinger, which they published in collaboration with Marcello Múscari in the Springer Verlag book series.

In the latest working paper (No. 38) on the Bundle Explorer: Touching, Bina Elisabeth Mohn presents the development and testing of a prototype for a praxeological research platform. The focus is on questions concerning the linguistic analysis of practices, their bundle-theoretical positioning, and the relationship between a flat ontology and Wittgenstein’s concept of grammatical observation.

About the Working Paper

Exploring contemporary digital politics

As a follow-up publication to the CRC lecture series in summer 2024, the special issue on Digital Sovereignty has now been published at communication +1, edited by Christoph Borbach and Tristan Thielmann.

→ Special Issue

About the Special Issue

This special issue explores digital sovereignty as one of the defining yet most contested concepts of contemporary digital politics. While sovereignty has traditionally been tied to the nation state, current debates—ranging from platform governance and data capitalism to the discourse on Sovereign AI—demonstrate that power is increasingly mediated by corporate infrastructures and algorithmic systems. Bringing together inter- and transdisciplinary perspectives from Media and Communication Studies, Critical AI and Data Studies, Science and Technology Studies, Political Philosophy, Sociology, and Information Systems Research, the special issue examines how sovereignty is enacted, negotiated, and reconfigured across diverse sociotechnical domains. Rather than treating sovereignty as a stable property—of states, organizations, or individuals—the authors conceptualize it as a relational and transformative concept embedded in design, digital practices, and technologies of datafication. The contributions demonstrate that digital sovereignty is best understood as a multi-layered site where infrastructures, data ethics, and imaginaries intersect, foregrounding how agency and autonomy are redefined within the entangled human–machine ecologies of the digital age. In this way, the special issue positions digital sovereignty as a central object of inquiry for Critical AI and Data Studies, offering conceptual tools to address its practices, ethics, platforms, and theories.

The Special Issue contains contributions by our members Tristan Thielmann, PI of P04 „Precision Farming: Co-operative Practices of Virtual Fencing“, and Christoph Borbach, researcher of P04 „Precision Farming: Co-operative Practices of Virtual Fencing“, about “The Digital Leviathan: Medializing Sovereignty for Critical AI and Data Studies” and others including Leah Miriam Friedman, Gwen Lisa Shaffer, Renée Ridgway, Anne Mollen, Jose Francisco Marichal, Thomas Wendt, Stephan Packard, Dennis Lawo, Gunnar Stevens, and Jenny Berkholz.

About communication +1

communication +1 is a peer-reviewed open access journal, which promotes new approaches and opens new horizons in the study of communication from an interdisciplinary perspective. The journal is particularly committed to promoting research that seeks to constitute new areas of inquiry and to explore new frontiers of theoretical activities linking the study of communication to both established and emerging research programs in the humanities, social sciences, and arts.

Interdisciplinary perspectives on the interfaces of technologies, sounds, and people

published by Christoph Borbach (University of Siegen, CRC 1187), Timo Kaerlein (Ruhr-University Bochum), Robert Stock (Humboldt University Berlin) and Sabine Wirth (Bauhaus University Weimar)

The anthology “Acoustic Interfaces: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Interfaces between Technologies, Sounds, and People” published by Springer as an open-access book, opens up new perspectives on the media history and practice of analog and digital interfaces.

→ To the E-Book

About the book

In today’s media culture, acoustic interfaces are becoming increasingly important, as can be seen in many areas of everyday life such as work, mobility, and leisure. This volume takes this development as an opportunity to open up new perspectives on the media history and practice of analog and digital interfaces in order to highlight the significance of acoustics for the differentiation of contemporary interface cultures. The recent ubiquity of smart speakers, natural language processing, and voice user interfaces indicates a paradigm shift in human-computer interaction, whose media-cultural significance can only be adequately addressed through a comparative analysis from the perspectives of media and sound studies, ludomusicology, and dis/ability studies. Only digital infrastructures and machine learning algorithms make voice assistant technologies a social reality. This invites us to subject their cultural and technological history, media practice, affordances, and platformization to closer examination, combining aesthetic and technical as well as historical and computational approaches to analysis. In this way, the diverse and contradictory politics of acoustic interfaces are explored in depth and in their development in the 20th and 21st centuries. The analysis thus goes beyond a purely present-day diagnosis and at the same time formulates critical positions for the contextualization of future acoustic interface technologies.

The anthology includes contributions by Christoph Borbach, research assistant in project P04 “Precision Farming: Co-operative Practices of Virtual Fencing” together with Benjamin Lindquist on “Bodies, Voices, Prostheses. A History of Talking Interfaces as Assistive Technologies“ and by Tim Hector, research assistant in project B06 ”Un-/desired Observation in Interaction: Smart Environments, Language, Body, and Senses in Private Households“ together with Benedikt Merkle on “Tools and Media Practices. Intelligent Personal Assistants and the Paradigm of Object-Oriented Programming”.

edited by Natasha Klimenko (Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt University Berlin), Miglė Bareikytė (European University Viadrina Foundation & CRC 1187) and Viktoriya Sereda (VUIAS Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin)

The anthology “Images and Objects of Russia’s War against Ukraine”, published by transcript as an open-access book, explores how art, media, infrastructures, and material culture respond to and contest the Russo-Ukrainian War.

→ To the E-Book

About the book

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has destroyed lives, communities, and cities. From the start, images of this war spread across various media platforms. Paintings, photographs, drone footage, TikToks, and Instagram posts shaped how the war is experienced, represented, and archived. In this multidisciplinary volume, artists, scholars, and writers explore how art, media, infrastructures, and material culture respond to and contest the Russo-Ukrainian War.

The publication has been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – Project-ID 262513311 – SFB 1187 Media of Cooperation, and the Gerda Henkel Stiftung, Düsseldorf.

About the book launch

10 November 2025 | 6pm | Pilecki-Institute Berlin, Pariser Platz 4A, 10117 Berlin

Panelists: Natasha Klimenko, Miglė Bareikytė, Viktoriya Sereda; Moderation: Eva Yakubovska

The book launch will feature a presentation of the volume, including an essay film based on selected contributions from the book, highlighting the intersections of art, media, and war, and a panel discussion about the role of art during wartime and in commemoration. 

For participation please register via prisma[æt]trafo-berlin.de.