Events-Archive

Call for Papers

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 ➞

Experimental media artists are always entangled with the medium-specific materials they work with. They typically have to traverse and synthesise multiple mediated scales at once to repurpose or defamiliarise objects in order to make them speak, whether these scales be from voltages to music, bits to words, or pixels to perspectives. In this sense, media artists are engaged in capturing a material that in turn captures them, and ultimately captures the subjects the constructed artwork aims to address. An artwork is thus a site of ‘reciprocal capture’, to use a term from Isabelle Stengers, in that it undoes strict subject/object dichotomies. This is how artworks can be said to defamiliarise objects and give them a ‘voice.’ And it is not just objects that are defamiliarised but the ‘familiar subjects’ as well. So beyond being simply a savoir-faire, artwork making is a creative act that problematises and dramatises the familiar by shifting the attention and focus of our familiar questions/answers (e.g. Who/ what/ when/ where/ why/ how is our infrastructure? Who/ what/ when/ where/ why/ how are our mediated identities?, etc.).  

In this lecture, I will unstitch this way of dramatising ‘problems’ from how such dramatisation is articulated in certain spheres of academia: with empirical methods. In the field of (digital) Media and Cultural studies, there are many connections that could be drawn with the way I qualified what experimental media artists do and what methods supposedly do as well. Making an object speak is also a concern of method. That being said, the fragile and brittle ways in which ‘reciprocal capture’ is sustained in artistic practices are seamlessly re-captured by the (inter)disciplinary narratives that methods help articulate. Within these (inter)disciplinary narratives, methods harbour questions of legitimacy, which is to say they give these narratives abilities to disqualify works that do not fall within certain boundaries. Therefore, rather than collapsing the familiar distance between subject and object, methods’ mode of dramatisation reify a certain subject position that reinstates distances. 

One is thus entitled to ask: Who are the (distant) subjects methods create? Who decides when a method is a method? Taking stock of my own trajectory as an artist and academic, I will address these questions with some of my work and question the ‘methodological turn’ in my field, one that, I will argue, produces what Jean-François Lyotard calls ‘differends.’ Bio Dr. 

David Gauthier is Assistant Professor of Computational Media and Arts in the Media and Culture Studies department at Utrecht University. With a background in Mathematics, Media Arts and Sciences, and Cultural Analysis, Gauthier’s work fosters original means of studying objects and phenomena by making transdisciplinary connections between different modes of inquiry stemming from these cultural and scientific traditions. Influential to his scholarly work, Gauthier is also a practicing media artist. Through the production of artworks which have been commissioned by art institutions across Europe and North America, his engagement with computation spans cultural production and active participation in various cultural networks.  https://www.uu.nl/sta/dgauthier/ https://davidgauthier.info/

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. 

Resolution Studies attempts to uncover how resolutions inform both machine vision and human perception. I believe it is incredibly important to unpack the ways in which resolutions organize our contemporary (technological) processes. Considering that resolutions do not only impose how or what gets run or seen, but also what images, settings, ways of rendering and points of view are forgotten, obfuscated, or simply dismissed or unsupported. In short: resolutions are not just a determination of how something or someone is run, read and seen, but also of who or what options are compromised and unresolved. 

Rosa Menkman is a Dutch artist and researcher of resolutions. Her work focuses on noise artifacts resulting from accidents in both analog and digital media.

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 ➞

To register for the masterclass please send an email to the coordination.

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

Unfortunately, the event has to be canceled due to illness! We will keep you updated whether we can find an alternative date for Jenny Sundén’s lecture.

Building on and expanding discussions of the value of anonymity and pseudonymity in digital cultures in general, and in queer digital cultures in particular, this presentation explores notions of opacity as modes of resistance to dominating regimes of visibility on and beyond social media platforms. Across queer, postcolonial and digital media theorizing, opacity provides a way of thinking through the tension between the visible and the invisible, challenging the idea of public visibility and identification as that which drives data cultures and legitimizes marginalized sexual practices and expressions. Suggestive of discussions on tactical, queer uses of social media in terms of disconnection and reluctance, opacity affords yet another way of thinking resistance to platform power and user control.

Based on an ethnographic study of the Swedish digital BDSM, fetish and kink platform Darkside, this presentation discusses opacity in two ways: first, as a way of considering tactical uses of Darkside between modes of revealing and concealing, and second, as a way of conceptualizing the platform as a borderland between intelligibility and unintelligibility. The platform provides an opening for shared vulnerabilities and collective forms of secrecy reminiscent of what Clare Birchall (2021) calls “radical secrecy,” which in the context of Darkside grants both privacy and degrees of public kink visibility to its members. Birchall imagines radical secrecy – or “postsecrecy” – as a mode of collective resistance to both neoliberal transparency and secret state surveillance in datafied societies.

Opacity implies a lack of clarity; something opaque may be both difficult to see clearly as well as to understand. Drawing on Édouard Glissant (1997) and his idea of “the right to opacity” as a form of resistance to surveillance and imperial domination, a digital sexual politics of opacity could help provide recognition without a demand to fully understand sexual otherness, opening up for new modes of obscure and pleasurable sexual expressions and transgressions on social media platforms.

Jenny Sundén is Professor of Gender Studies at Södertörn University and a Guest Professor in Gender Studies, Uppsala University in Sweden. She has been a Visiting Scholar at University of California at Berkeley; University of Surrey; Peking University, Beijing; Hunter College (CUNY), New York City; and University of Turku. She currently focuses on digital sexual cultures, sextech, audio erotica, and the politics of pleasure. She is the PI of the research projects “Digital sexual health: Designing for safety, pleasure and wellbeing in LGBTQ+ communities” funded by Forte: Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (with Kath Albury and Zahra Stardust) and “Listening pleasures: Sexual health and audio fiction in a time of digital intimacy” funded by The Swedish Research Council (with Anna Hultman, Sara Tanderup Linkis and Linn Sandberg). She is the author of Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment (Peter Lang, 2003), Gender and Sexuality in Online Game Cultures: Passionate Play (with Malin Sveningsson, Routledge 2012,) Who’s Laughing Now? Feminist Tactics in Social Media (with Susanna Paasonen, MIT Press 2020) and Hot connections: Why sexual platforms matter (with Susanna Paasonen and Katrin Tiidenberg, MIT Press forthcoming 2026).

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. Annette Klinkert (city2science)

Part #1: Start the Dialogue, Open Up Science! – Introduction to Science Communication and Public Engagement

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

The term “Luddite” is a pejorative that marks one as an opponent of emergent technology, and, by extension, the future that these new technologies bring to bear. This designation derives from the experience of the historical Luddites, who, according to popular myth, put up a doomed resistance to the Industrial Revolution in favor of remaining in a pre-industrial, pre-mechanical craft past through the technique of machine breaking. Recent historical treatments have sought to put the Luddite struggles in a more sympathetic light, rationalizing the destruction of machines as a component of labor struggle. But can analysis go further than a retroactive justification of Luddite praxis? Can we understand Luddite struggles, both historical and contemporary, not as attempts either to maintain an existing state of affairs or to retreat to an idyllic technological past, but as offering a positive vision of the future? This talk will sketch out these Luddite futures in the interest of developing a concept of Luddism that can act as a political challenge to dominant hypercapitalist technofutures as well as romanticized primitivist ones.

Gavin Mueller is an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and a tutor in the Critical Studies program at the Sandberg Instituut. He is the author of Breaking Things at Work (Verso 2021) and Media Piracy in the Cultural Economy (Routledge 2019).

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. 

To register for the masterclass please send an email to the coordination.

How we perceive the climate catastrophe and the associated ecological crises depends largely on how they are negotiated in the media. It is therefore also a question of the media whether and how people can be politicised or mobilised for climate justice. We highlighted this at our first Spring School on climate, media and anti-fascism in spring 2024. Now we want to continue our efforts to connect activism, journalism, art and science – and go beyond analyses: This time, the focus is particularly on digital research practices, climate journalism and climate activism on Tiktok: we’re learning some skills for sharing! For our programme, we have invited Correctiv’s climate editorial team and the research collective Tactical Tech, among others. We will be looking at climate narratives, migration and the far-right appropriation of the climate discourse. There will also be a workshop on climate justice issues in teaching at the university. In addition to inputs and workshops, there will be a performance on Saturday evening. Afterwards, we hope to raise a glass with you.

All interested parties from university, activism, journalism, art and civil society are cordially invited! Journalists, people interested in research, committed people – spread the word & come along.

Please register by 31 March at mail[æt]mediaclimatejustice.org.

We will help with travel and accommodation.

The workshop aims to

• Reflecting on your own strengths, interests and values

• Structuring application documents

• Practical tips for the application process

Target group: Female students and female assistants at the SFB who are about to graduate

Participant limit: 8 participants

Duration: 7.5 hours incl. breaks (9:00 – 16:30)

Format: Online via Zoom & digital collaboration on Miro

Workshop language: German

Registration by Wednesday, 12 March by email to Selina Seibt

The workshop will be led by Julia Sommer → juliasommer.net

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.