Events-Archive

Sensing Loss – Uni Köln goes r e t u r n: 60 Minutes AnthroLab.

Donnerstags 16:30-17:30Uhr 

Dr. Simone Pfeifer (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt): Wer wird gehört? Postdigitale Erinnerung nach rechter Gewalt in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft

Die Diskussionsreihe Sensing Loss bringt ethnologische Forschungen aus der Universität ins Museum. Sozial- und Kulturanthropolog:innen aller Karrierestufen berichten aus ihren aktuellen Forschungen, wie Menschen Verlust erfahren und Verlusterfahrungen bearbeiten. Sensing Loss fragt, wie Verlust begegnet, verkörpert und verräumlicht wird – und wie aus Vertreibung, Enteignung und vergangenem Unrecht neue Zukünfte gewonnen werden können. Erfahrungen des Verlusts (loss), ihre Konfrontation und Aufarbeitung [r e t u r n] sind dabei so vielfältig wie die Situationen, in denen Menschen Kolonialismus, Marginalisierung oder Gewalt begegnen. Die öffentlichen Vorträge diskutieren Formen des Sensing, über die Menschen Verlust gewahr werden, und Sense Making, d.h. die Frage, wie Menschen Verlusterfahrungen eine Bedeutung verleihen. Trauer, Verlust und Erinnerung können zur Quelle werden, Ansprüche an die Gegenwart zu artikulieren und zwischen Menschen und Orten, Vergangenheit und Zukunft neue Verbindungen zu erarbeiten. Im Sinne der Ausstellung r e t u r n  beschäftigen sich die Vorträge mit ganz unterschiedlichen Momenten und Formen der Trauer, der Nostalgie, der Erinnerungsarbeit und des gemeinsamen Aufbruchs. 

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The lecture series Sensing Loss connects anthropological thinking across university and museum spaces. Social and cultural anthropologists at all career stages discuss their ongoing research to explore how people sense and make sense of loss. Sensing Loss asks how loss is experienced, embodied and spatialized – and how displacement, dispossession and past injustices can become sources for new future-making practices. Experiences of loss, their confrontation, and the ways in which people try to come to terms with them – and find ways to r e t u r n – are as diverse as the situations in which people experience colonialism, violence or marginalization.

The public lectures discuss how grief, loss and remembrance can become resources for articulating claims on the present, and for shaping new connections between people and places, past and future. In resonance with the exhibition r e t u r n at the RJM, the lectures engage with diverse moments and forms of grief, nostalgia and memory work, as well as with joint departures into new futures.

Sensing Loss – Uni Köln goes r e t u r n: 60 Minutes AnthroLab.

Donnerstags 16:30-17:30Uhr 

PD Dr. Omar Kasmani (Freie Universität, Berlin): After Love. On Loss, Home and Other Heartbreak

Die Diskussionsreihe Sensing Loss bringt ethnologische Forschungen aus der Universität ins Museum. Sozial- und Kulturanthropolog:innen aller Karrierestufen berichten aus ihren aktuellen Forschungen, wie Menschen Verlust erfahren und Verlusterfahrungen bearbeiten. Sensing Loss fragt, wie Verlust begegnet, verkörpert und verräumlicht wird – und wie aus Vertreibung, Enteignung und vergangenem Unrecht neue Zukünfte gewonnen werden können. Erfahrungen des Verlusts (loss), ihre Konfrontation und Aufarbeitung [r e t u r n] sind dabei so vielfältig wie die Situationen, in denen Menschen Kolonialismus, Marginalisierung oder Gewalt begegnen. Die öffentlichen Vorträge diskutieren Formen des Sensing, über die Menschen Verlust gewahr werden, und Sense Making, d.h. die Frage, wie Menschen Verlusterfahrungen eine Bedeutung verleihen. Trauer, Verlust und Erinnerung können zur Quelle werden, Ansprüche an die Gegenwart zu artikulieren und zwischen Menschen und Orten, Vergangenheit und Zukunft neue Verbindungen zu erarbeiten. Im Sinne der Ausstellung r e t u r n  beschäftigen sich die Vorträge mit ganz unterschiedlichen Momenten und Formen der Trauer, der Nostalgie, der Erinnerungsarbeit und des gemeinsamen Aufbruchs. 

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The lecture series Sensing Loss connects anthropological thinking across university and museum spaces. Social and cultural anthropologists at all career stages discuss their ongoing research to explore how people sense and make sense of loss. Sensing Loss asks how loss is experienced, embodied and spatialized – and how displacement, dispossession and past injustices can become sources for new future-making practices. Experiences of loss, their confrontation, and the ways in which people try to come to terms with them – and find ways to r e t u r n – are as diverse as the situations in which people experience colonialism, violence or marginalization.

The public lectures discuss how grief, loss and remembrance can become resources for articulating claims on the present, and for shaping new connections between people and places, past and future. In resonance with the exhibition r e t u r n at the RJM, the lectures engage with diverse moments and forms of grief, nostalgia and memory work, as well as with joint departures into new futures.

The conference, entitled ‘Language Connects: Cooperative Communicative Practices in Media Societies’, focuses on all types of linguistic and communicative media practices (in the broadest sense) through which actors, acting (more or less) in accordance with the situation, work towards facilitating cooperation and/or sustainably promoting cohesion, or counteracting the production of categories of social difference.

A conference itself also constitutes a cooperative communicative practice sui generis. This becomes particularly evident when it is not merely an academic conference. This conference is being held to mark the 60th birthday of Prof. Dr Stephan Habscheid, and the organising team is delighted to be able to engage in in-depth discussions with the speakers and all conference participants on specific and, in our view, highly relevant aspects of cooperative communicative practices.

To aid planning, the organising team would ask that you send an informal registration to Jan Gerwinski (gerwinski[at]germanistik.uni-siegen.de) by 15 September 2026.

Histories of Tracking

Université de Luxembourg | Universität Siegen

September 30 – October 2, 2026

International conference jointly organised by the C²DH – University of Luxembourg and Universität Siegen

Surveillance has become ubiquitous in digital media environments and is now taken for granted. With every PayPal interaction, at the least more than 600 trackers eavesdrop on its transactional data (Schneier 2018). While there is no lack of critique on digital surveillance and its discontents, its ubiquity and naturalization itself require more explanation. Which historical and economical trajectories have led into the current escalation of digital tracking, tracing, monitoring, classification, intelligence service, and advertising? How can we discover and mobilize counter-points and narratives that explain digital surveillance otherwise? Do micro-level media, data, and sensor practices represent “yet another mutation of capitalism,” to quote from Gilles Deleuze’s famous Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990)? 

Tracking persons, emotions, objects, apparatuses, money, signs and data is a veritable environing technique. It is also one of the key business applications of platform and data economies, which provide for the infrastructures of state-side institutional surveillance and control. With our joint Luxembourg-Siegen conference on Histories of Tracking we aim to track the trackers historiographically, technologically, and ecologically.

In a seminal text, Phil Agre (2003 [1994]) has encouraged us to think about the difference between rather centralized regimes of (visual) surveillance and data-based institutional regimes of “capture.” Agre has paved the way for a logistical theory of digital surveillance that investigates its micropolitics. While non-visual alphanumeric modes of capturing data do not feel like surveillance, they nonetheless establish an ever more mundane and affective mode of ubiquitous surveillance. What if we follow Agre’s analysis of institutional “grammars of action” that afford a whole spectrum of capturing, monitoring, sensing, and surveillant practices? Histories of tracking, we assume, are histories of the institutions, corporations, and agencies that create the tapestry of surveillance (Lauer 2017). That tapestry might seem all-encompassing and seamless by now, even if it contains loose threads, loopholes, and islands of encryption. 

Histories of tracking are co-operative histories that involve the consent, non-consent and dissent of digital media usage (Jones 2024). They are also business histories that rely on what Shoshana Zuboff (2019) has aptly called a “behavioral surplus” of data––without properly historicizing its inception. Last but not least, histories of tracking are histories of its public scrutiny and accountability, from opposing civil rights movements to the political and legal controversies that make the case for regulation.

We thus invite dedicated contributions from Media and Cultural Studies, History, Science and Technology Studies, Surveillance Studies, Platform Studies, Code Studies, Socio-Informatics, Law, and Sociology that combine historiographic and empirical work with grounded theoretical approaches. Activist and artistic positions that rethink tracking and/in/as media environments are highly welcome!

Scientific committee

• Sebastian Giessmann
• Valérie Schafer
• Tatjana Seitz
• Anne Schreiber
• Inga Schuppener

Organisation

• C²DH – University of Luxembourg
• Universität Siegen

With the support of Collaborative Reseacg Centra 1187 Media of Cooperation, Siegen; project A01: Digital Network Technologies between Specialization and Generalization; C²DH, Université de Luxembourg; FNR, Luxembourg and DFG, Germany

References

Agre, Philip E. “Surveillance and Capture. Two Models of Privacy.” In theNewMediaReader, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort. MIT Press, 2003 [1994].

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1992): 3–7.

Jones, Meg Leta. The Character of Consent. The History of Cookies and the Future of Technology Policy. Information Policy. MIT Press, 2024.

Lauer, Josh. Creditworthy. A History of Consumer Surveillance and Financial Identity in America. Columbia University Press, 2017.

Schneier, Bruce. “The 600+ Companies PayPal Shares Your Data With – Schneier on Security.” Schneier on Security, March 14, 2018. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/03/the_600_compani.html.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. Public Affairs, 2019.

Sensing Loss – Uni Köln goes r e t u r n: 60 Minutes AnthroLab.

Donnerstags 16:30-17:30Uhr 

Prof. Dr. Franz Krause (Köln): Sensing Loss im Mackenzie-Delta: Auf der Suche in den Sedimenten vergangener Zukünfte

Die Diskussionsreihe Sensing Loss bringt ethnologische Forschungen aus der Universität ins Museum. Sozial- und Kulturanthropolog:innen aller Karrierestufen berichten aus ihren aktuellen Forschungen, wie Menschen Verlust erfahren und Verlusterfahrungen bearbeiten. Sensing Loss fragt, wie Verlust begegnet, verkörpert und verräumlicht wird – und wie aus Vertreibung, Enteignung und vergangenem Unrecht neue Zukünfte gewonnen werden können. Erfahrungen des Verlusts (loss), ihre Konfrontation und Aufarbeitung [r e t u r n] sind dabei so vielfältig wie die Situationen, in denen Menschen Kolonialismus, Marginalisierung oder Gewalt begegnen. Die öffentlichen Vorträge diskutieren Formen des Sensing, über die Menschen Verlust gewahr werden, und Sense Making, d.h. die Frage, wie Menschen Verlusterfahrungen eine Bedeutung verleihen. Trauer, Verlust und Erinnerung können zur Quelle werden, Ansprüche an die Gegenwart zu artikulieren und zwischen Menschen und Orten, Vergangenheit und Zukunft neue Verbindungen zu erarbeiten. Im Sinne der Ausstellung r e t u r n  beschäftigen sich die Vorträge mit ganz unterschiedlichen Momenten und Formen der Trauer, der Nostalgie, der Erinnerungsarbeit und des gemeinsamen Aufbruchs. 

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The lecture series Sensing Loss connects anthropological thinking across university and museum spaces. Social and cultural anthropologists at all career stages discuss their ongoing research to explore how people sense and make sense of loss. Sensing Loss asks how loss is experienced, embodied and spatialized – and how displacement, dispossession and past injustices can become sources for new future-making practices. Experiences of loss, their confrontation, and the ways in which people try to come to terms with them – and find ways to r e t u r n – are as diverse as the situations in which people experience colonialism, violence or marginalization.

The public lectures discuss how grief, loss and remembrance can become resources for articulating claims on the present, and for shaping new connections between people and places, past and future. In resonance with the exhibition r e t u r n at the RJM, the lectures engage with diverse moments and forms of grief, nostalgia and memory work, as well as with joint departures into new futures.

Sensoriality in social interaction has been a topic raising increasing interest in Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis (EMCA) these last years (Fele 2019, Goodwin, MH 2017, Liberman 2022, Meyer & Meier 2016, Meyer 2021, Mondada 2018, 2021, Mondada & Cekaite 2020), expanding previous work on multimodality (Goodwin, C 2018, Mondada 2019) and inspired by insights coming from, amongst others, Scottish moral philosophy, early Simmelian insights, phenomenology, and the anthropology of the senses. The issue has been to put multisensoriality on the agenda of interaction studies, with a special focus on how sensorial and perceptual practices relating to, and establishing, the world and others are publicly and recognizably achieved and shared in social interaction.

Building on this background, this workshop further discusses multisensoriality in social interaction, and in particular the potentials and prospects of the concept of synaesthesia for interaction research. Here, synaesthesia is not understood as a clinical or psychological condition, but as an everyday practical phenomenon—inspired by its phenomenological sense developed, among others, by Merleau-Ponty and Sartre. On this view, our experience of the world already involves constant cross-sensory supplementation and translation—for example, visual experience is routinely complemented by, and intertwined with, other sensory familiarities. Sartre famously stated that we ‘see’ the sourness of a lemon: “each of its qualities is extended throughout each of the others. It is the sourness of the lemon which is yellow, it is the yellow of the lemon which is sour. We eat the color of a cake, and the taste of this cake is the instrument which reveals its shape and its color to what we may call the alimentary intuition.” Merleau-Ponty similarly describes glass: we see its “hardness and brittleness (…), and when, with a tinkling sound, it breaks, this sound is conveyed by the visible glass.” The issue is for us to reflect about these insights within an interactional framework and on the basis of video analysis, within the epistemology and methodology of EMCA.

While we do not doubt the ongoing cross-sensorial supplementation and translation during perception, it is the generality of such descriptions that we would like to examine and discuss in the workshop. E.g., when do they apply in general, and when are perceptions only manifested through specific senses, and not others, or are not at all cross-sensorial, according to the particularities of the interactional situation and activity? How are sensory experiences and synaesthesias made accountable and sequentially fed into interaction? So far, the complementarity, substitutability, translatability, and mutual elaboration of sensory modes has mainly been discussed in studies of the individual perceptor. In this workshop, we will discuss empirical studies showing how participants ongoingly accomplish and also presuppose this phenomenon for their co-participants, as part of the assumed „objectivity of the world“, and use it in interaction—both in (1) interactionally achieved co-perception and co-sensing of relevant objects and in (2) co-bodily (including intercorporeal) interaction, where participants make their sensory perceptions, orientations and access accountable to one another up to and including having co-experiences.

Registration/Contact:
All are welcome, please send a short e-mail until 22.09. to: clemens.eisenmann[æt]uni-konstanz.de

Social media platforms are increasingly shaped by the integration of generative AI alongside long-standing analytical and predictive models. Today’s algorithmic systems are moving from the background infrastructure to the forefront of digital social life – intervening in the content feeds as conversational agents like xAI’s Grok, reshaping identity through synthetic likenesses of OpenAI’s Sora-2, and expanding the social ecosystem itself through projects like Butterflies AI and Moltbook, where autonomous AI agents operate in coexistence with (or independently of) human users. As these developments rapidly outpace existing research frameworks, the need for mixed critical methodologies grows more urgent. 

Synthetic social media research takes as its starting point the recognition that platforms shaped by generative AI are not simply data-processing systems but cultural environments organized through algorithms, interfaces, and shared ways of feeling and knowing. Analytically, the attribute “synthetic” implies more than artificial arrangements of collective agency. Rather than treating AI as a radical rupture, it situates generative systems within broader arrangements of human-machine co-creation that amplify specific imaginaries, values, and concerns. Methodologically, it foregrounds ambiguities in how AI platforms recalibrate meaning and how users develop a practical “feel” for algorithmic systems while negotiating their constraints.

Critical digital methods have responded to these developments by treating chatbots and generative systems as part of the research design as well as objects of inquiry in their own right. Synthetic text, images, and sounds are no longer exceptional artifacts but common platform vernaculars, sustained by entangled practices of prompting, remixing, and circulation. Within platform studies, interface methods, visual digital methods, and emerging forms of synthetic ethnography, AI systems have been repurposed for formatting, summarization, annotation, labeling, and the generation of synthetic data, while being interrogated for how they shape knowledge production. This work has foregrounded questions of method: Are we merely studying AI slop, distracted by the automated excess of content stripped of context and meaning, or are we witnessing the redefinition of social media itself along with its affordances and cultures of use?

The 2026 Autumn School edition of the CRC “Media of Cooperation” tackles this question by focusing on generative AI as an infrastructural, cultural, and regulated component of social media platforms across three intersecting dimensions: At the cultural level of everyday use, it refers to the routinized practices of prompting or interacting with platform-embedded generative systems through multimodal inputs. Infrastructurally, it signals a shift in agency, as platforms keep multiplying affordances that nudge us into co-producing synthetic outputs. Finally, it foregrounds research techniques for probing AI models in their entanglements with the platform governance and moderation regimes. 

Against this background, we invite participants to submit short contributions inspired by, though not limited to, one of the following “how to” prompts: 

• How to repurpose AI personas as research personas 
• How to rethink walkthrough methods in light of platforms’ generative affordances 
• How to approach cultural biases conditioned by AI systems and prompt cultures
• How to study AI moderation as platform policy in action
• How to explore platform agency and its steering ideologies 
• How to integrate screenshots as a method for capturing synthetic situations 
• How to account for the ambiguities emerging from human-machine co-creation
• How to develop non-extractive approaches to researching AI platforms

Participants are invited to submit a short abstract (maximum 500 words excluding references) outlining how their work relates to the event’s theme. Presentations should raise questions or provocations rather than present finished research. Accepted abstracts will be grouped into thematic sessions and discussed in a collaborative, dialogue-focused format.

Submit your proposal by 30. April 2026
Notification of acceptance by 15 May 2026
Registration by 15 June 2026

The event opens with a one-day conference and moves into hands-on workshops and project work. 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. The first day is about presentations and discussions. The next three days are dedicated to exploring and developing 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. Please bring your laptops. The project titles will be announced soon. The event is free of charge, though attendees are responsible for arranging and covering their travel and accommodation in Siegen.

Sensing Loss – Uni Köln goes r e t u r n: 60 Minutes AnthroLab.

Donnerstags 16:30-17:30Uhr 

Nanette Snoep (Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum Köln) & Prof. Dr. Martin Zillinger (Köln): Einführung. Senses, Sensors, Sensing: Eine kurze Einführung in die Ethnologie der Sinne
Dr. Simon Holdermann, Carla Tiefenbacher, MA (Köln): Sensory Walk

Die Diskussionsreihe Sensing Loss bringt ethnologische Forschungen aus der Universität ins Museum. Sozial- und Kulturanthropolog:innen aller Karrierestufen berichten aus ihren aktuellen Forschungen, wie Menschen Verlust erfahren und Verlusterfahrungen bearbeiten. Sensing Loss fragt, wie Verlust begegnet, verkörpert und verräumlicht wird – und wie aus Vertreibung, Enteignung und vergangenem Unrecht neue Zukünfte gewonnen werden können. Erfahrungen des Verlusts (loss), ihre Konfrontation und Aufarbeitung [r e t u r n] sind dabei so vielfältig wie die Situationen, in denen Menschen Kolonialismus, Marginalisierung oder Gewalt begegnen. Die öffentlichen Vorträge diskutieren Formen des Sensing, über die Menschen Verlust gewahr werden, und Sense Making, d.h. die Frage, wie Menschen Verlusterfahrungen eine Bedeutung verleihen. Trauer, Verlust und Erinnerung können zur Quelle werden, Ansprüche an die Gegenwart zu artikulieren und zwischen Menschen und Orten, Vergangenheit und Zukunft neue Verbindungen zu erarbeiten. Im Sinne der Ausstellung r e t u r n  beschäftigen sich die Vorträge mit ganz unterschiedlichen Momenten und Formen der Trauer, der Nostalgie, der Erinnerungsarbeit und des gemeinsamen Aufbruchs. 

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The lecture series Sensing Loss connects anthropological thinking across university and museum spaces. Social and cultural anthropologists at all career stages discuss their ongoing research to explore how people sense and make sense of loss. Sensing Loss asks how loss is experienced, embodied and spatialized – and how displacement, dispossession and past injustices can become sources for new future-making practices. Experiences of loss, their confrontation, and the ways in which people try to come to terms with them – and find ways to r e t u r n – are as diverse as the situations in which people experience colonialism, violence or marginalization.

The public lectures discuss how grief, loss and remembrance can become resources for articulating claims on the present, and for shaping new connections between people and places, past and future. In resonance with the exhibition r e t u r n at the RJM, the lectures engage with diverse moments and forms of grief, nostalgia and memory work, as well as with joint departures into new futures.

Annual Conference of the project B09 “Bicycle Media: Cooperative Media of Mobility”

Mobility is a cooperative process shaped by a variety of media, social, and infrastructural practices. Cycling, too, is conditioned by the interplay of diverse technologies, infrastructures, bodies, images, and public spheres. At the same time, bicycle mobility is neither neutral nor equally accessible to all: it is shaped by social power relations and diverse experiential worlds.

Against this backdrop, the annual conference of the research project “Bicycle Media – Cooperative Practices of Mobility” (SFB 1187 “Media of Cooperation”) examines the bicycle itself as a medium of public sphere and participation: as a form of mobility that connects people, places, perspectives, and knowledge, thereby enabling a specific appropriation of space. The conference takes as its starting point an expanded concept of media that encompasses not only audiovisual and digital formats but also understands (care) practices such as repair, activism, or collective cycling as forms of mediation.

Our perspective on cycling is shaped by the media. Conversely, cycling also shapes media spaces. In this context, the papers presented at the annual conference examine the bicycle (and cycling) as a medium of embodied experience and perception, particularly in relation to public discourses, emotions, bodies, and infrastructure. The conference will discuss diversity-sensitive and intersectional perspectives on bicycle mobility, for example with regard to mobility conflicts, gender and class relations, as well as unequal conditions of access and representations.

We cordially invite you to participate and join the discussion.

Shared bikes, e-scooters, and app-based mobility services have become a familiar feature of urban life. Frequently promoted as seamless, sustainable, and accessible modes of transportation, such services are increasingly leaving their mark in how people navigate and move through cities. So-called shared micromobility is also a disruptive presence in the street, as it creates new frictions, obstacles, and risks which destabilise habitual ways of traversing the city. Finally, as shared micromobility involves the creation of new infrastructures, it raises fundamental questions about public space, technological economy, data governance, accessibility, and civic participation, which cut across underlying transformations and everyday experiences of city life.

This workshop invites participants from diverse backgrounds – including users and non-users of shared mobility services, residents, policymakers, mobility planners, activists, researchers, and industry representatives – to collectively explore the role of shared micromobility in the city of Cologne. The workshop will use creative methods to observe, narrate, and analyse encounters with shared mobility systems in the lived environment of the street. Through situated mobility experiences, collaborative observation of micromobility situations, discussion, and mapping exercises, we seek to make visible the infrastructures, actors, technologies and practices of (e)valuation that shape contemporary urban mobility.

The workshop will be guided by a series of questions: How seamless – or seamful – and/or possibly disruptive are experiences of shared micromobility in practice? What infrastructures, data flows, forms of labour, and governance arrangements are involved in making these services (not) work? Whose needs, perspectives, and interests are reflected in current mobility systems, and whose are overlooked? How do digital platforms and mobility applications organise – and disorganise – access to urban space, mobility choices, privacy, and participation? And how should questions of sustainability be understood—not only in environmental terms, but also in relation to social justice, accessibility, and democratic accountability?

By exploring these questions from multiple perspectives and standpoints, the workshop aims to foster a collective inquiry into the promises, frictions, and consequences of shared micromobility. The aim, then, is to expand the frame on what is considered relevant to understanding and addressing the impacts and risks of the roll-out micromobility infrastructures. By creatively documenting encounters with micromobility on the level of the neighbourhood, we can articulate digital transformations and disruptions of our surroundings and their problems in a collectivising way.

Artist-led collaborative diagramming and narrative sculpting activities will guide the analysis of our shared observations of micromobility encounters. This shared process of narrative sculpting will inform a publicly accessible report on the seams and frictions of shared mobility in Cologne Ehrenfeld.

The workshop is organized by the project A03: Navigation in Online/Offline Spaces within the Collaborative Research Centre Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen, which investigates how mobile media, platforms, and digital infrastructures are reshaping navigation of and movement through urban environments. The main organisers of the workshop are: Carolin Gerlitz, Daniela van Geenen, Max Kanderske (Universität Siegen/University of Siegen) & Noortje Marres (CIM Warwick, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/), Artist-Researchers: Yasmine Boudiaf (Ambient Information Systems, London),  & Mukul Patel

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 templates 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. 

“Games and play are at once material and imaginary. They are real – but they trouble commonsense notions of reality; they offer multiple realities of fantasy, performance and intense experience” (Giddings 2014, S. 3).

In der Fortsetzung des Gesprächs- und Filmformats „Kameraethnographie trifft Seth Giddings“ explorieren wir unterschiedliche Spielräume in digitalen Kindheiten anhand aktueller Filme aus unserem Projekt, die wir entlang von Seth Giddings‘ „Gameworlds” (2014) diskutieren. Wir fragen, auf welche Weisen Vorstellungskraft zwischen Körpern, Dingen, Medien und Spielsystemen hervorgebracht wird und wie im Spiel Medientechnologien, Sounds, Spielzeuge und Rhythmen etc. alternative Raum-Zeitlichkeiten erzeugen.

Wir diskutieren den mikroethologischen Ansatz von Giddings mit seinem Schwerpunkt auf (digitaler) Materialität entlang gelebter Spielerfahrungen von Kindern. Wir vergleichen diesen mit dem mikroethnographischen Ansatz und der Kamera-Ethnographie als methodologische Grundlagen im Projekt mit der Frage: Wie wird Imagination von Kindern im Spiel beobachtbar?

Literatur:

Giddings, Seth (2014): Gameworlds. Virtual Media and Children’s Everyday Play. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic

Wer teilnehmen möchte, sendet bitte eine Mail an hoa.mai.tran@uni-siegen.de, um den Webex-Link und den Text im Vorfeld zu erhalten.

The SFB cordially invites you to the oral examination for Niklas Strüver’s doctoral dissertation.

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.

Schedule