In their new book, Data Grab, Ulises A. Mejias and Nick Couldry argue that the role of data in society needs to be grasped as not only a development of capitalism, but as the start of a new phase in human history that rivals in importance the emergence of historic colonialism. This new form of ‘data colonialism’ gives shape to a social order based not on the extraction of natural resources or labor, but on the appropriation of human life through data. Resisting it will require strategies that decolonial thinking has foregrounded for decades.

Ulises A. Mejias is Professor of Communication Studies at the State University of New York at Oswego, recipient of the 2023 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship, and a Fulbright Specialist from 2021 to 2025. He is the author of Off the Network (University of Minnesota Press 2013) and, with Nick Couldry, of The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism (Stanford University Press 2019). He serves on the boards of Humanities New York (a National Endowment for the Humanities affiliate) and of the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law.

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

Call for Papers

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

lead by Dr. Verena Molitor (city2science)

Part #2: Open Science and Open Innovation in Science Communication

About the Science Communication & Public Engagement Series #1-4

“...then there are of course times when there are problems that can be resolved simply by turning something off and on again, or problems that suddenly resolve themselves within the next two days, for which no one really knows the reason, and then you hear nothing about it anymore.” [Interview 11:425]

This trained agricultural mechanic and precision agriculture specialist describes his experience in the repair of digital agricultural machinery. He describes a glitch, a shaky moment of malfunction, of self-questioning, that is quickly followed by business-as-usual. Taking such elusive and mundane experiences of glitch further,  glitch art, glitch feminism and even glitch epistemologies have mobilized the glitch to point at other issues. Glitch art is “about relaying the membrane of the normal, to create a new protocol after shattering an earlier one.” (Menkman 2011, 341). The curator and writer Legacy Russel coined the term glitch feminism, calling for interventions that challenge gender binaries (Russell 2020). Glitches have been understood as signals of discriminatory orderings and mobilized to “illuminate the ways that race and technology intersect in pernicious ways” (Broussard 2024, 4). Therefore, glitch epistemologies have been proposed as ways of knowing computational cities (Leszczynski and Elwood 2022).

But what can thinking with and through the glitch offer to research on digital agriculture?  What are the potentials and limits? What can be seen through the glitch and what not? Can glitches be a starting point to identify further questions for digital agriculture? Building on ethnographic work on practices of repair in digital agriculture, this talk will explore glitchy vignettes from agricultural repair shops.

Alina Gombert studied Sustainable Agriculture (B.Sc.) and Crop Sciences (M.Sc.) in Kleve, Bonn and Lyon. As an agricultural scientist, she worked from 2018 to 2023 at the Federal Research Centre for Cultivated Plants (Julius Kühn-Institut) and the Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture (BMEL). In her current work she is looking for bridges between the arts and the rural, between the agricultural sciences and the social sciences and between agriculture and feminism. As a part of the //KOMPOST ensemble, she explores emancipatory ruralities in northern Hesse. She is excited by the transdisciplinary perspectives opened up by Science and Technology Studies.

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

lead by Dr. Annika Kreikenbohm (city2science)

Part #3: Communication Strategies and Pathways to Impact

About the Science Communication & Public Engagement Series #1-4

more information coming soon

Als Blicklabore bezeichnet die Kamera-Ethnographie Zusammentreffen, mit dem Ziel, „Blicke als Blicke zu reflektieren und in konkreten Forschungs­zusammenhängen damit zu experimentieren “ (Mohn 2023, S. 198).  Als Gäste werden Jürgen Streeck und Bina E. Mohn erwartet. Genauere Infos folgen.

Das Teilprojekt B05 „(Frühe) Kindheit und Smartphone“ lädt zu einem neuen Format ein, bei dem aktuelle Filme aus der laufenden Forschung des Projekts mit Textfragmenten aus Merleau-Pontys Klassiker „Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung“ zusammen betrachtet werden. Gemeinsam mit dem Mercator Fellow Jürgen Streeck werden die gezeigten Filmausschnitte und die phänomenologische Perspektive aufeinander bezogen.

Bitte melden Sie sich für die betreffende Veranstaltung an. Links zu den Filmen und Textauszügen werden eine Woche vor der Veranstaltung verschickt. Anmeldung bei Maria Espinosa Treiber unter: maria.etreiber[at]student.uni-siegen.de

Much like technological assemblages before it, what is commonly understood as AI is embedded in what Sheila Jasanoff and Sang-Hyun Kim call 'sociotechnical imaginaries' - a material and social construction of desirable futures and common sense. As such, AI is put in place in the broadest way possible, to signal progress, futurity, security, and so on. Meanwhile, our shared technological realities seem to be more about anxiety watching and doom scrolling, marking a gap in the common held public belief and private affects. While it is true and necessary to - as Timnit Gebru and others have done - demystify certain paradigms of AI in their historical problematics, their underlying colonial legacies and problematic forms of capitalist extraction, the talk argues that within AI environments, there is no fundamental 'truth' to be uncovered. Instead, AI coexists alongside and not despite its material realities of extraction, enslavement, and ecocide, while it also continues to create affective disjuncts and self-alienation. Resignifying AI as Ancestral Immediacies, my work delves into the promises of AI to unpack what they may entail, and to argue that now, more than ever, art and speculation are critical tools to respond to AI's seeming dialectics.

Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss is a culture and media researcher and curator, as well as a board member of diffrakt. Center for Theoretical Periphery in Berlin. She works at the intersections of feminist and anti-colonial art, political practices, digital technologies and narratives of (human and non-human) subjectivity. Recently published: “Queere KI. Virtuality and myths of un/uniqueness”, in: digital:gender - de:mapping affect. A speculative cartography, edited by Julia Bee, Irina Gradinari, Katrin Köppert. Spector: 2025

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

lead by Dr. Verena Molitor (city2science)

Part #4: Stakeholder Engagement and Engagement Formats

About the Science Communication & Public Engagement Series #1-4

more information coming soon

This talk will advocate for decomputing as a means to unstitch the shroud of AI which is being draped over our collective futures. It will identify scale as the core logic of contemporary datafication, and the total mobilisation of human and natural resources as its authoritarian consequence. The seams of AI are already visible in its shoddy emulations and violent preemptions, and what peers back through the gaps are forms of eugenic solutionism.

Decomputing acknowledges that even the tokenistic restraints of the liberal rules-based order and its regulatory frameworks have little traction in the current moment. It draws instead on concepts from degrowth and systemic transformation to challenge the inevitability of AI’s accelerationism. Decomputing seeks to apply the intentional seamfulness of conviviality through mechanisms such as the matrix of convivial technology, while recognising that this will require the counter-power of collectively organised resistance. 

Decomputing is an assembly point for all those drawn into conflict with AI’s technopolitics, such as environmental, feminist and decolonical social movements. In particular, it seeks to develop situated forms of social decision-making that disable future attempts at a computationally-assisted coup d’etat.

Dan McQuillan is a Lecturer in Creative and Social Computing. He has a degree in Physics from Oxford and a PhD in Experimental Particle Physics from Imperial College, London. After his PhD he was a support worker for people with learning disabilities and volunteered as a mental health advocate, informing people in psychiatric detention about their rights. In the early days of the world wide web, he started a pioneering website to provide translated information for asylum seekers and refugees. When open source hardware sensors started appearing he co-founded a citizen science project in Kosovo, supporting politically excluded young people to measure pollution levels and get the issue of air quality onto their national agenda. After a stint working in the NHS he joined Amnesty International and created their first digital directorate. Dan has been involved in many grassroots social movements such as the campaign against the Poll Tax in the UK, and in environmental activism. He was part of the international movement in Genoa in 2001 which was protesting against the G8 and calling for an alternative globalisation that included justice for both people and planet. During the first wave of Covid-19 he helped to start a local mutual aid group where he lives in North London. Dan recently authored Resisting AI—An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence.

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

More information coming soon.

More information coming soon.

About | Program Highlights | Proposal Submission | Venue | Program | Contact

About the Autumn School

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI), big data processing, and synthetic media has profoundly reshaped how culture is produced, made sense of, and experienced today. To ‘synthesize’ is to assemble, collate, and compile, blending heterogeneous components into something new. Where there is synthesis, there is power at play. Synthetic media—as exemplified by the oddly prophetic early speech synthesizer demos—carry the logic of analog automation into digital cultures where human and algorithmic interventions converge. Much of the research in this area—spanning subjects as diverse as augmented reality, avatars, and deepfakes—has revolved around ideas of simulation, focusing on the manipulation of data and content people produce and consume. Meanwhile, generative AI and deep learning models, while central to debates on artificiality, raise political questions as part of a wider social ecosystem where technology is perpetually reimagined, negotiated, and contested: What images and stories feed the datasets that contemporary AI models are trained on? Which imaginaries are reproduced through AI-driven media technologies and which remain latent? How do synthetic media transform relations of power and visibility, and what methods—perhaps equally synthetic—can we develop to analyze these transformations? 

The five-day event at the University of Siegen—organized by the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centers Media of Cooperation and Transformations of the Popular together with the Center of Digital Narratives in Bergen, the Digital Culture and Communication Section of ECREA and the German National Research Data Infrastructure Consortium NFDI4Culture—explores the relationship between synthetic media and today’s imaginaries of culture and technology, which incorporate AI as an active participant. By “synthetic,” we refer not simply to the artificial but to how specific practices and ways of knowing take shape through human-machine co-creation. Imaginaries, in turn, reflect shared visions, values, and expectations—shaping not only what technologies do but how they are perceived and made actionable in everyday life. 

The event opens with a one-day conference and moves into hands-on workshops and collaborative projects. With multiple opportunities for exchange across disciplines, we encourage especially early-career researchers and PhD students to present their ideas during the conference and join a project led by international facilitators and data designers. We invite submissions of short abstracts (max. 500 words) for presentations engaging with questions and provocations related—but not limited—to topics such as: 

Critical data studies perspectives on AI: how data infrastructures, labeling, and curation shape the outputs we call “synthetic”; Cultural afterlives of training data: how racialized, gendered, or colonial imaginaries persist in synthetic media outputs; Methodological uses of GenAI: the politics that we buy in when repurposing AI as a method, from inherited bias to epistemic tensions; Synthetic personhood and likeness: exploring deepfakes, AI-generated avatars, and the power of (in)authenticity; Online cultures and platforms: how AI-generated content circulates across platforms—from memes and art to fan fiction, music, and poetry; Postcolonial and feminist critiques of AI: challenging universalist assumptions in generative models and interrogating whose knowledge is made (in)visible; Clichés, formulas, and repetition in GenAI outputs: how AI-generated stories and images rely on familiar tropes, visual styles, and narrative conventions; The aesthetics of noise in AI-generated content: repetition, glitch, randomness, and their role in producing or disrupting meaning; GPTs as infrastructural components: how generative pretrained transformers operate as configurable, customizable, and task-oriented agents embedded in platform infrastructures; Prompting and/as probing: prompting as a form of critical intervention, shaping co-authorship, sense-making, and research design; The ethics of training AI: from historical records and religious texts to indigenous cosmologies and oral traditions—what are the implications of using culturally sensitive knowledge to train generative models? Generative AI and Memory: synthetic media as a means of reimagining the past—through deepfake testimonies, interactive historical simulations, and other forms of computational memory-making; Generative AI in activist contexts: can AI be used for resistance or reimagining community—in the face of its environmental footprint and complicity in extractive systems? 

Program highlights

The event blends three complementary formats:

Mix questions!

Monday, 8 September

Day one begins with a keynote by Jill Walker Rettberg and opens space for emerging questions—think of it as an idea hub. Accepted abstracts will be grouped into thematic sessions curated by the organising team. Presenters will be connected via email ahead of time to coordinate their contributions. Each presentation will be set to 10 minutes to allow ample time for discussion, collective thinking, and exchange. The emphasis is on dialogue, not polished conclusions.  

Mix methods!

Tuesday, 9 September-Thursday, 11 September 

The next three days—featuring a workshop by Gabriele De Seta and an artistic intervention by Ángeles Briones and DensityDesign Lab—are about exploring new methods—hands-on! We invite you to join a team of interdisciplinary scholars and data designers in probing new methodological combinations. Each of our project teams will present a research question alongside a specific method to be collaboratively explored. Participants will not only learn how to design prompts and work with AI-generated text and images but also how to critically account for genAI models as platform models. All projects draw on intersectional approaches, combining qualitative and quantitative data to explore the synthetic dimensions of AI agency—whether as content creator, noise generator, hallucinator, research collaborator, data annotator, or style imitator. Please bring your laptops. The project titles will be announced soon. 

Synthesize!

Friday, 12 September  

The final day is dedicated to sharing, reflecting, and synthesizing the questions, methods, and insights developed throughout the week. Project teams will present their collaborative processes, highlight key takeaways, and discuss how their ideas and approaches shifted through hands-on experimentation with methods.

Proposal Submission

Please submit your proposal (max. 500 words) outlining how your work aligns with the event’s theme by 20.06.2025, using this form. Please note that the number of participants will be limited to maintain focused and engaging discussions. All submissions will be peer-reviewed. 

The event is free of charge, though attendees are responsible for arranging and covering their travel and accommodation in Siegen. Limited travel support is available (two to three stipends ranging from €500 to €700). Early-career researchers and PhD students are invited to apply; stipends will be awarded by the NFDI4Culture consortium based on the strength of the justification, particularly concerning critical ethical engagement with AI research data, as well as the distance and cost of travel. Short summaries of the presented work will be published on the NFDI4Culture website.

A certificate of participation will be issued for both the conference presentation and the hands-on workshop sessions.

Timeline:
Submit your proposal by 20 June 2025.
Notification of acceptance by July 15 2025.
Registration by August 1 2025.

more information coming soon

How do you become a professor and master the balancing act between career and family?

This lecture by Beatrice Schuchardt from the University of Regensburg is followed by a Q&A, where young female academics will have the opportunity to ask Professor Beatrice Schuchardt questions on the topics of 'Academic career' and 'Academic career with child(ren)'.

Beatrice Schuchardt was appointed a W3 professorship for Spanish and French Cultural and Literary Study at the University of Regensburg last year. Until 2024 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Romance Studies at the University of Siegen.

The event is aimed at female academics at all career stages. It is organised by FraMeS - Women's Mentoring Siegen in cooperation with the CRC 1187 'Media of Cooperation' and the CRC 1472 'Transformations of the Popular'.