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.

Studying Media as an Ongoing Accomplishment

We are excited to invite you to this summer’s Lecture Series on “Cooperative Methodologies – Studying Sensory Media and AI”. Inspired by Simon Garfinkel’s notion of “ongoing accomplishment”, we invited eight guest speakers to explore research methods and situations methodologically.

→ Register here

About the lecture series

The lecture series “Cooperative Methodologies – Studying Sensory Media and AI” addresses methodological problems that emerge from studying media as an “ongoing accomplishment” (Garfinkel). The central premise is that methods cannot be treated as external instruments applied to pre-given objects. Rather, research situations are constituted through the entanglement of media and tools, technical and human sensing, and research practices. Methodological reflection thus focuses on the conditions under which knowledge is cooperatively produced and problematised.

A key challenge is the multiple situatedness of digital and sensor-based media. Practices are locally embedded yet generate and connect multiple situations through infrastructural distribution, real-time synchronization, and scalability. Micro-situations must therefore be analyzed in relation to infrastructures of sensing and sense-making, data publics and stakeholder constellations, and the interplay of human perception with technical sensor systems. This requires methodological designs that combine approaches capable of tracing cross-scale relations and controversies.

Furthermore, the lecture series is concerned with the methodological status of digital tools and AI systems within research practice. Tools for collecting, sharing, analysing, and visualising data inscribe their own ordering capacities into research. With sensor data and AI outputs, these effects intensify: classifications, recommendations, and model biases shape what can be observed, archived, and interpreted. The series situates these dynamics within debates on performativity, inscriptions, bias, and interface methods, while emphasizing that they emerge in entangled sensory research practices involving human and non-human agencies.

Finally, the lecture series inquires into how methodological choices distribute attention and agency: they determine which experiences count as data, which forms of sensing become legible, and which publics are addressed and which are excluded. Accordingly, the series approaches methods as political arrangements that govern participation in knowledge-making – asking whose voices enter datasets and models, whose interpretations shape analytic pipelines, and whose concerns remain unaccounted for. Cooperative methodology may require making conflicts over categories, metrics, and evidentiary standards explicit, accountable, and revisable.

Lectures & Speakers

We invited eight international guest speakers from media studies, social science, economics, informatics, linguistics, science and technology studies as well as art and activism. They come from the Netherlands, Finland, Iran, USA, Germany and Great Britain. 

Event Details

• Dates: April 15 – July 8, 2026
• Location: University of Siegen, Herrengarten 3, Room: AH-A 217/18
• Streaming: via Webex
• Time: Wednesdays, 2:15 AM – 3:45 PM CET

How to Register

All events take place in hybrid form (on-site and via Webex). No registration is required if you would like to attend on-site. To attend the lecture online via Webex, please register here →

Contact

info[æt]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de

Thank you, and we hope to see you there!

The Spring School MEDIA EXTRACTIVISM explores, at the intersection of media and cultural studies and activism, how “raw materials” are extracted, used, constructed, imagined, and discursively negotiated. In doing so, it reflects on the complex interweaving of materiality, media representation, imagination, and the societal attribution of meaning.

• What images, narratives, and frames shape public perceptions of raw materials, energy sources, or sustainable alternatives?
• How do journalistic, social, and artistic formats portray the fragility and urgency of resources, as well as their creative power of healing and care?
• Which extractive regimes do algorithmic and cloud-based systems generate or perpetuate?
• How do we narrate the water, land use, and energy conflicts associated with AI and cloud computing?
• Where can we mobilize and practice resistance against extractive violence in our everyday lives?

The Spring School invites scholars, activists, and journalists to explore theoretical and empirical approaches to resources as phenomena of media culture. Within the framework of the Spring School, we aim not only to analyze discourses and representations but also to conceive new performative and participatory communication formats. The goal is to connect scholarly perspectives with climate policy action, thereby providing new impetus for a critical analysis of media-driven extraction that critically expands the public understanding of sustainability and, in light of the urgency to act, finds ways to address the climate catastrophe.

We look forward to lectures and workshops with Migration Audio Archive, Jakob Claus, Gerko Egert, Azadeh Ganjeh, Matthias Grotkopp, Mariette Kesting, Frederike Lange, Petra Löffler, Julia Nitschke, Maike Reinerth, Rémi Willemin, and others.

Studierende, Lehrende und ihre Seminargruppen sind – etwa im Rahmen von Exkursionen – herzlich willkommen, an unserer Media Climate Justice Spring School no. 3 in Bochum teilzunehmen. Infos und Anmeldung unter: mail@mediaclimatejustice.org

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

Synthetic Social Media: Studying Platform-Embedded AI

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.

→ Apply here 

The Amazon of Drone Warfare

By Hendrik Bender und Max Kanderske (Universität Siegen, SFB)

In their latest working paper (No. 39), Hendrik Bender and Max Kanderske show how the “platformization of drone warfare” is developing in the Russian-Ukrainian war. The focus is on both the FPV drone as a hardware platform and the Delta and Brave1 software platforms, which are used to economize and gamify media practices in battlefield management and military logistics.

→ to the Working Paper

About the Working Paper

Both Russia and Ukraine have been using drones on a large scale since the early stages of the war. Initially, this took the form of various types of consumer drone warfare, using commercially available ready-to-fly drones from well-known manufacturers such as DJI or Autel. However, over the last few years, there has been a significant shift towards locally manufactured first-person view (FPV) drones. This development requires – at least on the Ukrainian side – an increasing platformization of military operations.

In this article, we highlight three distinct but intertwined areas of platformization: 1) the modular FPV drone itself, understood as a military platform for sensor and weapon systems; 2) Delta, a software ecosystem for the planning and cooperative execution of drone attacks; 3) and the Brave1 Market, a logistics platform that connects military units with equipment and weapons manufacturers and is also referred to as the “Amazon for drone warfare.”

In doing so, we show that platformized drone warfare is transforming and economizing military organization and procurement processes in terms of gamification and liberal market logic. By datafying and making the operational chain from drone development to battlefield deployment (ac)countable, Delta and Brave1 are intended to ensure quality control and enable self-organization in the face of an increasingly complex network of military technology start-ups and heterogeneous hardware components. The infrastructures created in the course of platformization for drone development and the collection of operational data form the basis for future (semi-)autonomous forms of drone warfare based on machine learning and AI systems.

About the authors

Hendrik Bender is a research assistant in Project B08 “Agentic Media: Formations of Semi-Autonomy” of the Collaborative Research Center “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen. His research interests include figurations of cooperation between human actors and synthetic agents, as well as the investigation of spatial and medial practices of flying cameras.
Max Kanderske is a research assistant in project A03 “Navigation in Online/Offline Spaces” of the Siegen SFB “Media of Cooperation.” Beyond navigation, his research interests include sensor-media environments and digital play spaces. He is co-editor of the game studies journal “Spiel|Formen.”

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.

„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

Our key findings indicate that while LLMs function as highly scalable analytical tools, they are also costly and subject to rapid obsolescence, as increasingly capable models are introduced at a fast pace opening both opportunities and challenges for future research. The LLM-led analyses tended to privilege broadly applicable and generalized narratives, often at the expense of interpretive depth, thereby creating an epistemic distance between researchers and the data. Moreover, human involvement in the hybrid approach frequently shifted researchers’ roles toward administrative tasks such as prompt design and output management, rather than deeper analytical engagement. Across both analytical tracks, we observed a shared pattern in how professional identity and legitimacy are negotiated in an AI-augmented research context: routine analytical labor is delegated to AI systems, while human expertise is redefined around validation, oversight, and boundary-setting. Overall, the project raises critical questions about the methodological validity of LLM-centric qualitative workflows and suggests that increased scalability through AI may come at the cost of interpretive richness and theoretical nuance.