Exploring contemporary digital politics

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

→ Special Issue

About the Special Issue

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

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

About communication +1

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

About the conference and data sprint (23.- 25.09.2025)

The three-day hybrid event “War Sensing Through the Telegram Archive of the War” consisted of two interconnected parts: a public conference and a semi-public data sprint. The conference brought together around 40 participants, whereas the subsequent semi-public data sprint convened a group of about 20 scholars from various disciplines such as media and communication studies, sociology, engineering, data science and history, as well as practitioners from archival institutions and non-governmental organisations, including human rights monitoring and OSINT groups. 

Rooted in the interdisciplinary focus of the CRC 1187 “Media of Cooperation” with its praxeological approach to digital and data-based media, the conference and data sprint, co-organised by the “War Sensing” project (European University Viadrina and the CRC “Media of Cooperation”) and the Telegram Archive of the War (Center for Urban History in Lviv) opened up a framework for collaborative knowledge production addressing ethical challenges to work with archived social media data from multidisciplinary experiences. This event format is a continuation of the collaboration between the War Sensing project and the Center for Urban History and builds on the previous data sprint “Memory under Fire” with the Telegram Archive of the War (further: the Archive) organised in 2022 (see Bareikytė et al. 2024). In 2025, the collaboration continued the research on digital platform archives with contemporary questions, while addressing ethical implications of archiving user-generated content, and asking how to collaboratively work with ephemeral and fragile digital data.

As the ongoing Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine is documented not only by institutions but also by civilians who record and share their experiences via digital platforms, Telegram plays a crucial role as a space for coordination, expression, information exchange, and collective sense-making (Nazaruk, 2022). The Archive, curated by the Center for Urban History in Lviv, thus captured a part of the digital dimension of the war. Since February 2022, the Center has been systematically archiving public Telegram channels related to the war, including those used for evacuation, OSINT, mutual aid, memes, infrastructures, or local reporting. The Archive, therefore, offered a unique basis for empirical, inventive and interpretive research into how war is experienced, represented and documented. 

Opening the conversation: Program summary of the events

The conference and data sprint was opened with an event on 22 September in Frankfurt (Oder) by Dr. Susanne Spahn (University of Passau), who presented her book “The Russia Network: How I became a Russia expert and why I can no longer be one today” [Das Russland-Netzwerk: Wie ich zur Russland-Versteherin wurde und warum ich es heute nicht mehr sein kann]. Moderated by Johanna Hiebl (European University Viadrina), the public event engaged a diverse audience of Frankfurt residents and university employees discussing the scale of Russia´s information influence in Germany. A specific focus was laid on how the so-called alternative media in Germany can be used as a mouthpiece for the propagandist narratives of the Russian regime or sabotage recruiting. 

On 23 September, the hybrid conference connected Frankfurt (Oder) and Lviv, with a keynote lecture by the event co-organiser Taras Nazaruk (Center for Urban History) about the context of establishment and curatorial ethics of the Telegram Archive of the War. Nazaruk outlined the ethical and contextual challenges of archiving digital communication from Telegram during the ongoing war. During the evening keynote sessions, Miglė Bareikytė (European University Viadrina) moderated a talk and discussion by Asia Bazdyrieva (University of Applied Arts Vienna) & Svitlana Matviyenko (Simon Fraser University) and a talk and discussion by Daria Hetmanova (Simon Fraser University). Bazdyrieva and Matviyenko outlined their notion of the “Labour of Witnessing” as an often invisible form of experience, examined through feminist and critical theory. They also reflected on how the environment exposes the complexities of war and makes them visible. The public conference concluded with a keynote talk by Daria Hetmanova, who presented her research into mechanisms and practices of detention and filtration on the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine with an aim to understand how these detentive environments reproduce and extend through temporal and spatial dimensions.

The public talks were complemented by three tutorials focusing on the practical implementations of doing research with/on Telegram: Sayyara Mammadova (Atlantic Council) presented hands-on insights on how to start investigative processes with Telegram. Kateryna Maikovska (University of Vienna) brought the group into reflective work about doing digital ethnography on Telegram. Guillén Torres Sepulveda (Berkeley Human Rights Center), in his tutorial presented how exposure to sensitive content is not neutral, but can cause emotional and ethical challenges. He also highlighted how the investigator’s own agency influences both the interpretation and practice of doing digital investigations.  

Exploring War Through Data: Summary of the Data Sprint

During the data sprint, we invited scholars, archivists, civic tech and OSINT communities, and civil society actors to work collaboratively with selected datasets from the Telegram Archive of the War. The data sprint participants explored curated datasets by joining one of the following pre-defined research projects: detention and filtration, sabotage, crowd witnessing (cf. Andén-Papadopoulos, 2013) and trustworthiness of OSINT outputs (cf. Digital Method Initiative, 2024). Data sprint is an intensive research method that brings participants from interdisciplinary backgrounds to collectively analyse (digital) data in one space for a limited amount of time. Drawing on the open, experimental ethos of hackathons and barcamps, they foster interdisciplinarity through shared space, hands-on-data methods, and collaborative knowledge production (Venturini, Munk & Meunier, 2016). 

Group 1: Mapping Infrastructures of Filtration through the Telegram Archive of the War

The primary objective of the first group was to identify patterns in how infrastructures of filtration unfold beyond formal governance, focusing on the preparation and normalisation of filtration and detention practices that were discursively supported from the first day of the full-scale invasion. As a subproject of “Occupation Watch” (a CIDER initiative), this project aimed to contextualise and critically examine records issued by the occupiers by analysing Telegram channel messages and comments from pro-Russian sources. 

The group work was guided by the following research question: How do public Telegram communications reflect and document the filtration practices of Russian occupation in Ukraine, such as detention sites, and how these practices evolved over time? One has to remark here that also civilians documented their lived experiences of this control and administrative changes through local resistance, but following a do-no-harm approach for individuals now living under occupation, this data could not be considered during the data sprint. This is why the focus for the analysis was placed on Telegram communication close to narratives of the Russian regime. 

The project group was searching the Telegram Archive within the whole archived period from 28.02.2022 to 31.12.2023 for the keyword of “filtration” in Russian and coding Telegram data directly in the interface of the Archive. This allowed for an analysis of both the conduct of Russian combatants (via posts) and the motivations of the pro-Russian individuals participating in discussions (via comments). The group could trace back how pro-Russian channels portrayed the construction of filtration practices as “cleansing” or “curing” Ukraine of Western influence. This discourse, reinforced by hateful speech and dehumanising narratives, shows how digital communication spaces contributed to the conceptual and psychological infrastructure of violence exposing a horrifying mentality that justified atrocities, war crimes and the war itself.

Group 2: Sabotage on Telegram

The second group aimed to understand how sabotage is narrated in Telegram, and how sabotage is an example of a contemporary form of destabilisation and, especially, resistance during war. Ukrainian citizens and other resistance groups repurposed the platform to organise and deliberate upon the acts of sabotage, demonstrating its role not only as a tool for oppression but also as a tool of resistance to occupation, giving insights into how opposition is organised and sustained under Russian occupation in eastern parts of Ukraine and within Russia itself. 

The group investigated the following research questions: “How do the sabotage groups establish their presence on Telegram: what are their vernacular practices?” and “How is sabotage as a practice and the positionality of the authors are defined and metaphorised?” 

Their work delved into how these channels define and represent sabotage, establish their digital identities, and communicate their objectives to their audiences. Specifically, the group’s qualitative approach of in-depth analysis of selected messages focused on understanding how specific sabotage channels established themselves, communicated this establishment, and what topics and activities they talked about in the first months of their establishment. The group narrowed the focus to three anti-Russian public channels and conducted three rounds of open coding on the selected initial posts, developing categories related to positionality, self-reference, framing of actions, functions and narratives of the posts. 

This qualitative approach aimed not for a total representation of the channels’ activities but for a deeper understanding of the foundational narratives and operational framing of sabotage-focused Telegram channels and is planned to be further developed in a co-authored academic paper.

Group 3: It has begun. The first hours of the invasion: witnessing the outbreak of the war through urban chats

Telegram platform also served as a chronicle of the war’s impact on civilians, documenting their responses during the first hours of the invasion. The third research group focused on how the outbreak and first hours of Russia’s full-scale invasion were witnessed and experienced by residents of one city in the eastern part of Ukraine. By analysing public Telegram chats from February 24, 2022, the group investigated the immediate social and informational dynamics of a city under attack. The research questions were the following: “How did the outbreak of the full-scale invasion become witnessable through Telegram?” and “What practices does it allow one to analyse in the context of invasion based on its representation on Telegram?”. The group investigated approximately 7,000 messages from city-based chats using a combination of distant and close reading techniques. For distant reading, the group used web-based text analysis to identify high-frequency words. For close reading, each group member took several keywords for a qualitative analysis and contextualisation. Afterwards, thematic coding revealed the most frequent concerns among residents, including transportation, shelters, medical, telecom, and food supplies, shelling/explosion, civilian harm, among others. The analysis highlighted an overwhelming sense of confusion and uncertainty, as citizens sought answers to urgent, life-critical questions while adapting to rapidly changing conditions, including the access to crucial societal services, including pharmacies, or questions about the potential attacks on civilians by the Russian troops. Despite the chaos, the data also revealed a process of civilian adaptation even during this first day. By the end of the day, alongside persistent uncertainty, messages of gratitude began to appear, directed toward the Ukrainian army and service providers.

At the end of the datasprint the third project group expressed interest in critically assessing the efficacy of methodologies such as distant reading or developing a context-specific glossaries to better interpret the unique linguistic and cultural nuances that have transformed since the beginning of the full-scale invasion.

Group 4: Evaluation of the trustworthiness of OSINT outputs on Telegram 

This oscillation between confusion and coordination mirrors the broader messiness of the information flux during the war, but also beyond. As communication intensified on social media, a dramatic increase in user-generated content emerged, some of which aimed to clarify this messiness, while others aimed to enlarge the noise. These dynamics of social media, with increased access to publicly shared Open Source Information (OSINF), introduce the need to and challenges in assessing the trustworthiness and authenticity of publicly shared content. 

Building on the Amsterdam Matrix (Digital Methods Initiative, 2024), an analytical framework and its application handbook published by the members of OSINT for Ukraine (Hiebl et al., 2025), the fourth project group aimed to test the Amsterdam Matrix and adapt this framework to Telegram’s specific platform affordances, focusin on two questions: “Which elements of the Amsterdam Matrix are adaptable to Telegram’s architecture?” and “What new parameters should be added to assess OSINT credibility within Telegram’s ecosystem?”. 

By exploratory analysis and collaborative qualitative coding of a small sample dataset of OS(INT)-labelled Telegram messages, the group observed a notable variation in textual and thematic formats of outputs. This led to informed proposals for modifying or replacing certain parameters of the Amsterdam Matrix – originally developed on the basis of posts from Twitter/X – to better suit Telegram’s platform affordances. A significant challenge noted by the group was assessing the large volume of low-quality and difficult-to-verify content. As a related side project, the team also explored methods for verifying the integrity of data within the archive to certify if content was altered by computational methods.

These verification challenges exemplify how methodological concerns are inseparable from effective sense-making in a chaotic information environment. Looking forward, this project group anticipates developing educational materials based on these findings and integrating AI into investigative workflows to scale-up and strengthen verification efforts.

A word of thanks from the organisers

The format of the hybrid conference and data sprint around the Telegram Archive provided a space to carry out hands-on-data research, discuss the intersection of different approaches and ethical challenges by drawing on specific thematic and temporal contexts. Beyond the specific findings of each research group, the data sprint surfaced several overarching themes concerning ethical and methodological challenges that came up while collaboratively working with the digital data archived by the Telegram Archive of the War. Participants grappled with issues regarding the research ethics such as anonymisation/pseudonymisation of user data, how to write about distressing and sensitive content from Telegram for a public audience, and navigating further issues, such as ensuring that no harm is caused to data producers, discussing the functionality of the tool and its potential improvements, and the future direction of research.

In times of war in Ukraine and thus in Europe, when ongoing Russia’ s bombardment a make collaborative travelling to/from Ukraine and thus research in one place difficult, this hybrid conference and data sprint was a meaningful way to continue to do research despite these circumstances and engage with war-related issues that are pressing for participants from academia and praxis. As organisers of the workshop, we want to thank everyone who joined this workshop for their mutual support and collaboration.

Project “War Sensing” (Prof. Dr. Miglė Bareikytė & Johanna Hiebl) and The Center for Urban History/”Telegram Archive of the War” (Taras Nazaruk)

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

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

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

→ To the E-Book

About the book

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

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

Sorry, this entry is only available in Deutsch.

STELLENAUSSCHREIBUNG:

Du bist interessiert, organisiert und hast Lust, in einem kleinen Team in die spannende und abwechslungsreiche Welt der wissenschaftlichen Arbeit einzutauchen? Veranstaltungen mitzugestalten und bei der Datenerhebung mitzuwirken klingt nach deinem Ding und du möchtest Wissenschaft online und offline erlebbar machen? Dann suchen wir genau dich!

SHK/WHB-Stelle im SFB-Teilprojekt B05 „(Frühe) Kindheit und Smartphone. Familiäre Interaktionsordnung, Lernprozesse und Kooperation“

Im DFG-Sonderforschungsbereich 1187 „Medien der Kooperation“ suchen wir eine studentische Hilfskraft (SHK) oder eine wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft mit Bachelor-Abschluss (WHB) für das Teilprojekt B05 „(Frühe) Kindheit und Smartphone. Familiäre Interaktionsordnung, Lernprozesse und Kooperation“ des zum

1. Januar 2026 zu folgenden Konditionen:

• 5-10 Stunden/Woche (nach Vereinbarung)
• zunächst für 1 Jahr, mit der Möglichkeit einer Verlängerung
• Beschäftigung auf Grundlage des Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetzes

Was dich bei uns erwartet:

• (Erziehungs-)Wissenschaft praxisnah: Du interessierst dich für Themen der Kindheit, Medien und Digitalität. Deine Mithilfe bei der Recherche von passender Literatur, der Korrektur von Publikationen, der Transkription von Forschungsdaten ist gefragt.
• Hands-on bei Events: Deine Ideen und Hände sind gefragt. Hilf mit bei der Organisation und Durchführung öffentlicher Veranstaltungen, z.B. Workshops, Tagungen und einer Ausstellung.
• Teil des Teams: Deine Teilnahmen an unseren (Online-)Teammeetings sind ebenso gefragt wie deine Ideen.

Was du mitbringen solltest:

• Du bist in Erziehungswissenschaft, Sozialwissenschaft oder Medienwissenschaft immatrikuliert.
• Du interessierst dich für Kindheitsforschung und das Aufwachsen von Kindern im Kontext von Digitalisierung.
• Du hast Spaß daran, Dinge zu organisieren und an gesellschaftlichen Themen mitzuwirken.
• Du arbeitest strukturiert, bist eigenständig und verantwortungsbewusst.

Was wir dir bieten:

• Ein motiviertes, nettes Team und eine entspannte Arbeitsatmosphäre.
• Flexible Arbeitszeiten und Homeoffice-Möglichkeit – damit Uni und Job zusammenpassen.
• Spannende Einblicke in die Projektarbeit und Wissenschaftsorganisation rund um unsere Langzeitstudie im Kontext von Kindheit, Medien und Digitalität.

Klingt gut? Dann schick uns eine kurze Bewerbungbis zum 15.11.2025 und zeig uns, warum du perfekt in unser Team passt. Sende deine Bewerbungsunterlagen (Motivationsschreiben, Lebenslauf, Zeugnisse) in einer pdf-Datei an Dr. Astrid Vogelpohl (astrid.vogelpohl@uni-siegen.de). Wir freuen uns darauf, dich kennenzulernen.

Weitere Informationen zu unserem Forschungsprojekt und dem Sonderforschungsbereich findest du hier: https://www.mediacoop.uni-siegen.de/de/projekte/b05/

Deine Ansprechperson:

Dr. Astrid Vogelpohl

astrid.vogelpohl[æt]uni-siegen.de

Challenges and affordances of doing media research with generative AI

This series explores the challenges and affordances of doing media research with generative AI. AI is not only a subject of media studies, but deployed to collect data, interpret texts, perform mult-modal analysis, and assist writing. But what happens when prompts, models, and training data enter the methodological core of media studies? On what grounds can we cooperate with AI in research? The seminar series Synthetic Methods takes these questions as its point of departure. It explores current practices, tools, approaches and issues of synthetic methods, asking how AI participates in producing, mediating, and interpreting knowledge.

In recent years, the tools and infrastructures of generative AI—large language models, multimodal systems, and computer-vision pipelines—have begun to blur the boundaries between data collection, analysis, and interpretation. AI does not simply assist researchers in automating tasks; it brings in its own epistemic logics, biases, and inscriptions. Text and image generation models suggest categories, segment data, or simulate field interactions. They act as synthetic interlocutors in ethnographic work, as co-coders in qualitative analysis, or as analytical lenses in cultural analytics. The series engages with these developments hands-on and conceptually, examining what it means to “do research with AI.”

At the centre of the series lies an interest in the distributed accomplishment of discovery between humans and AI. Instead of handing analytical capacity entirely to computational systems, we will explore how reasoning, interpretation, and sense-making can emerge collaboratively across human and AI agencies. Generative models may extend perception and imagination, but they also depend on human intervention, interpretation, and evaluative judgment. The sessions thus foreground research as a shared practice of translation and negotiation, where human reflexivity and AI inference together shape what counts as evidence, relevance, and insight. This distributed perspective opens the space to examine the affordances, issues, and evaluative criteria that govern scholarship when AI becomes part of the epistemic process: How can we maintain reflexive, critical and ethical orientations while experimenting with new, mixed agencies of knowing?

Over the course of the semester, the series will address a range of perspectives and practices. An initial session on infrastructures and AI ethics situates large-scale models within the political economies of cloud computing, highlighting questions of privacy, transparency, and data provenance. Subsequent meetings explore how AI reshapes established methodological domains: as an assistant in qualitative analysis and ethnography, as a writing companion and reflective mirror in academic text production, and as a tool for analyzing visual and multimodal materials. Participants will experiment with both commercial and locally hosted models, comparing their capacities and constraints.

Specific attention will be given to the question if and how synthetic methods require specific modes and practices of methodological reflexivity. The series does not treat models as neutral instruments but as infrastructures with their own histories, biases, and aesthetics. Engaging with generative systems thus becomes an exercise in distributed reflexivity: models, prompts, and humans co-produce insight. This distributed agency raises fundamental questions of authorship, responsibility, and transparency that reach beyond technical documentation. To “work synthetically” is to navigate this entanglement without surrendering critical distance—to cultivate a mode of inquiry that remains aware of its own mediations.

Schedule
22.10. Infrastructure and synthetic reasoning – Understanding beyond AI with Hinau Firdaus and Amita Kapoor

05.11. AI for Ethnographic Analysis

19.11. Writing with AI with Sergei Pashakhin

3.12.

17.12.

14.01.

Location

All lectures take place on-site in Siegen with a hybrid setting. You can register to get the Webex-link and join sessions online.

University Siegen
room: AH-A 217/18
Herrengarten 3
57072 Siegen

Registration

Please register via email to info[æt]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de

Organisation

The series is organized by INF project “Infrastructures for Collaborative Sensory RDM Practices”.

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

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

→ To the E-Book

About the book

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

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

About the book launch

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

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

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

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

Outreach Event in Bochum

The project “Bicycle Media: Cooperative Media of Mobility” presents the film Ovarian Psycos, a documentary by Joanna Sokolowski and Kate Trumbull-LaValle, on October 16.

Important Info

OVARIAN PSYCOS
Documentary by Joanna Sokolowski and Kate Trumbull-LaValle (USA 2016) | 72 min. | Original version | Free admission
Date: 16.10.2025 | Doors open: 6:30 PM | Start: 7:00 PM
Location: Kino Endstation
Wallbaumweg 108
44894 Bochum

About Ovarian Psycos

Riding at night through the streets of Eastside Los Angeles is considered dangerous. But the Ovarian Psycos Bicycle Brigade, a misfit crew of feminist women of colour, use their bikes to confront the violence in their lives. In their first joint full-length film, Sokolowski und Trumbull- LaValle portray three of the crew protagonists: Xela de la X, founder of the group, single mother and rapper, street artist Andi, who aspires to become a leader in the crew, and bright-eyed recruit Evie.

»Our initial concept of the film was an all-out-super-heroine story. A story where confident, unwavering young women – the Ovas – take back the streets en masse, on bikes, shouting in the face of convention. But once we started production the film took a turn. The real super- heroine work was happening behind the scenes, in daily life, within their personal relationships as mothers, daughters, and sisters. We met working-class young women who were strong but vulnerable. Feminism isn’t something the Ovas choose, but it has been inherited. Inherited from living in a community politicised by the civil rights movement, and by the realities and challenges of growing up within the context of colonisation, immigration, racism, misogyny and gendered violence. These were women dramatising power and freedom on their bikes, at night, publicly in the streets, and at the same time struggling to hold onto that same power as single mothers, aspiring artists, students and working women.«

– Joanna Sokolowski and Kate Trumbull-LaValle.

This event is organized in cooperation with the Bochumer Cycling Club Windkante, Ruhr University Bochum (Chair of Gender Media Studies) and the SFB Media of Cooperation.

Carpets as a medium of storytelling 

by Tahereh Aboofazeli and Arjang Omrani

SFB 1187 “Media of Cooperation” hosts the exhibition WE ARE NOT CARPETS: I tell you my story, which will be open from October 6 to 31, 2025, at Poool Kunstraum in Siegen. Five art weavers from the North Khorasan region of Iran participate in the exhibition, showcasing eight life-size carpets and sharing their deeply personal stories.

The exhibition is curated by Tahereh Aboofazeli (University of Cologne) and Arjang Omrani (Ghent University) in cooperation with the DFG funded Collaborative Research Center (SFB 1187) “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen.

Dissertation on linguistic practices with voice assistants from project B06 published

by Tim Hector (University of Siegen)

Tim Hector’s dissertation, which he wrote as part of his research work in project B06: “Un/solicited observation in interaction”, has been published as an open access publication in the “Empirical Linguistics” series by De Gruyter.

About Smart Speakers in Dialogue

The dissertation “Smart Speakers in Dialogue. Linguistic Practices with Voice User Interfaces” examines voice assistants from a linguistic perspective. The focus is on smart speakers such as “Alexa” or “Google Home.” These devices are voice-controlled and provide, among other things, music or weather information. The study investigates how dialogue with these devices is linguistically organized, what practices emerge, and how the devices are integrated into everyday life.

The work combines theoretical discussions on praxeology and domestication with an empirical analysis of audio and video recordings. The corpus includes situations of initial installation and everyday use. For audio recordings in everyday life, a specially developed device was used that automatically captures voice commands (Conditional Voice Recorder, see our CRC-Working Paper No. 23). Methodologically, the dissertation follows a qualitative research design and draws on principles of conversation analysis.

The analyses show for dyadic dialogues (i.e., one person and one device), that address terms such as “Alexa” are newly functionalized and that the course of conversations must follow strict sequential patterns. Practices from other conversation-analytic categories—such as turn-taking or repair—remain visible but are technically reshaped. New practices also emerge, such as deliberate interruptions (barge-ins).

In multi-party situations, smart speakers are sometimes framed linguistically as participants, sometimes as objects. Particularly noteworthy is a “formal-functional split”: utterances that appear to be addressed to devices often serve other purposes—such as humor, frustration management, or the domestication of resistant technology.

Research on AI, Big Data Processing & Synthetic Media

The CRC “Media of Cooperation” launches its Critical Data School initiative at the University of Siegen with the international Autumn School “Synthetic Imaginaries: The Cultural Politics of Generative AI”.

→ Autumn School Programme 

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? 

About the Autumn School

The five-day event at the University of Siegen 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. 

Event Highlights 

The five-day event features three keynotes and opens with a conference that brings together a total of six panels with contributions by scholars from Hong Kong, Norway, Australia, Germany, Austria, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, Taiwan, and the UK. 

Our keynotes

• “Synthetic Narration: Do AI-generated stories flatten cultural diversity?” by Jill Walker Rettberg (Center for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen) 
• “Synthetic situations: Ethnographic strategies for post-artificial worlds” by Gabriele de Seta (Center for Digital Narrative, University of Bergen) 
• “Design Research with visual generative AI: failures, challenges, and research pathways” by Ángeles Briones (DensityDesign Lab, Politecnico di Milano)

From the second day onwards, the Autumn School moves into hands-on workshops and project work facilitated by a team of interdisciplinary scholars and data designers. 

Mix questions! Monday, 8 September 

Day one opens space for emerging questions—think of it as an idea hub. The panels explore diverse topics, from identities and digital narratives to platforms, infrastructures, and the politics of AI. The discussion-focused format invites participants to pose questions, share concepts, and highlight methodological challenges in an open exchange, rather than focusing on individual presentations. 

Mix methods! Tuesday, 9 September-Thursday, 11 September 

The next three days are about exploring new methods—hands-on! 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—with contributions by Gabriele De Seta (University of Bergen), Marcus Burkhardt (University of Paderborn), Hendrik Bender (University of Siegen), Marloes Geboers (University of Amsterdam), Elena Pilipets (University of Siegen), Riccardo Ventura (Politecnico di Milano), Andrea Benedetti (Politecnico di Milano), Ángeles Briones (Politecnico di Milano), Carolin Gerlitz (University of Siegen), Sara Messelaar Hammerschmidt (University of Siegen), Jill Walker Rettberg (University of Bergen). 

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. 

The Autumn School is organized by the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centers Media of Cooperation (SFB 1187) and Transformations of the Popular (SFB 1472) together with the Center of Digital Narrative in Bergen, the Digital Culture and Communication Section of ECREA and the German National Research Data Infrastructure Consortium NFDI4Culture.