„The project contributes to critical empirical studies as well as to the legal evaluation of the intransparent, complex and dynamically developing practices of sensing and sense-making in digital advertising.“
The SFB cordially invites you to the oral examination in the doctoral examination proceedings of Yarden Skop. The dissertation defense will take place on Thursday, 10 December 2026, from 13:00 p.m. to 15:00 p.m.
During the defense, Yarden Skop will present and academically defend the findings of the dissertation before the examination committee. The title of the dissertation is: “Making Online Speech Governable: Problematizations, Platforms, and Publics in Algorithmic Moderation Infrastructures”.
How is problematic speech online turned into something a machine can detect? Drawing on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork across content moderation teams on news websites, fact-checking organizations and EU-funded AI consortia, Yarden Skop examines how counter-hate speech and counter-disinformation initiatives problematize speech in distinct ways in order to operationalize these definitions through ML technology. The media studies project follows four cases: Google’s Perspective API, Meta’s Third-Party Fact-Checking program, Full Fact and its Alpha tool, and the EU Horizon-funded VeraAI project. It draws on interviews, event ethnography and on participant observation of participatory design workshops.
At its core are the research questions:
Who and what constitutes speech problems online, such as disinformation and hate speech – where did they come from, what are their specific constructions in the domains in which they are problematized?
Second, What forms of governing practices and social regulation are enabled when defining the problems as such?
Third, How are these governing practices executed in the building of software and machine learning tools for mediating said problems?
The central thesis of the dissertation is that definitions of problematic speech are not settled before technologies are built but are enacted, narrowed and stabilized in the tools, data practices and funding arrangements that claim to only apply them. These decisions are not neutral, and taken together, these projects can be seen as “moral infrastructures” built to define, identify and enforce the boundaries of acceptable speech.
The dissertation project is part of the SFB’s Integrated Graduate School and Skop is a member of project A07: “The Industry of Personal Data”.
The Collaborative Research Centre (CRC 1187) “Media of Cooperation” welcomes four new Mercator Fellows: Azadeh Ganjeh, Olga Goriunova, Maija Hirvonen, Christopher Salter and Jürgen Streeck. These outstanding researchers will bring their academic expertise and innovative research approaches to CRC 1187 this year.
About the Mercator Fellowship at CRC 1187
To strengthen academic collaboration within the research network, CRC 1187 awards Mercator Fellowships to outstanding researchers from Germany and abroad. Mercator Fellows conduct research for an extended period in close collaboration with one or more of the sub-projects involved in CRC 1187, addressing questions relating to digital, data-intensive media. Together with the regular members, our Mercator Fellows pursue the shared goal of further developing interdisciplinary approaches and helping to shape the CRC’s research programme. The inclusion of these renowned researchers not only strengthens the international network of CRC 1187, but also promotes the transfer of knowledge and ideas that is of central importance to the CRC’s research into the digital present.
The Mercator Fellowship is a module within the funding programmes of the German Research Foundation and serves to enable intensive and long-term research exchange.
Azadeh Ganjeh is a performance artist, scholar, dramaturg and activist, and a member of the collective Rebel-Ist-hah!. Born in Tehran, Iran, she holds a Master’s degree in theatre directing from Tehran Art University and received her doctorate in 2017 in philosophy with a focus on theatre studies from the University of Bern.
Azadeh specialises in socially engaged and site-specific performances, participatory productions, performative interventions in urban space, and community theatre for socio-political empowerment. Her research interests include narratives and politics of the stage, the performativity of public events, the performative interaction of body and space, emancipation through the performing arts, aesthetics of performativity and space, and activism in performance art.
After working as a professor at the University of Tehran, she taught at numerous European universities and has been working since April 2022 as a researcher and lecturer at the Institute for Media, Theatre and Popular Culture at the University of Hildesheim. In October 2024, she took up the professorship for Performative Arts in Society at the University of the Arts in Society in Ottersberg, where she combines artistic practice with critical research on performance and social change.
Olga Goriunova is Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a cultural theorist, working across technology, philosophy and aesthetics. Her latest book, Ideal Subjects. The Abstract People of AI (2025) explores how data and artificial intelligence abstract people into new kinds of subjects. The questions of subjectivation in relation to art and technology have been central to her work. Her previous book, Bleak Joys. Aesthetics of Ecology and Impossibility (co-authored, 2019) explores aesthetics, ethics and ecology during times of multiple crises. This work traces connections between large scale systems such as ecologies, technical infrastructures or mechanisms of calculation and processes of subjectivation. Her first book Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet (2012) conceptualises aesthetic and political engagements with technology at the dawn of the World Wide Web, proposing the concepts of organisational aesthetics and art platforms to understand collective art practices and art movements of the 1990s and early 2000s. This book is based on her work as a co-organiser of software art repository Runme.org and a co-curator of software art festivals (four editions of the Readme festival between 2002 and 2005 in Moscow, Helsinki, Aarhus and Dortmund) and other exhibitions. She edited or co-edited four Readme publications, the most significant of which is Readme. Software Arts and Cultures (Aarhus University Press, 2004). She is also the editor of Fun and Software: Exploring Pleasure, Pain and Paradox in Computing (2014) and a co-founder and co-editor of Computational Culture, a Journal of Software Studies.
Prof.‘in Dr. Maija Hirvonen
Professor for German language, culture and translation
Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences | Language Studies | German
Maija Hirvonen is a full professor in German language, culture and translation at the Languages Unit of the Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences of Tampere University. She leads BA, MA and PhD studies in German linguistics and translation. She is director of Langnet, the Network of Doctoral Programmes in Language Sciences in Finland, and sits on the steering board for Plural (the multidisciplinary research centre for languages and cultures). She co-leads the Tampere Accessibility Unit and the Multimodality in Translation and Interpreting research group.
Her research specialisms include:
accessibility (esp. audio description)
multimodal and intermodal translation and interpreting
blind-sighted and other asymmetrical interaction
teamwork
distributed/interactive intelligence and the interface of cognition and interaction
Jürgen Streeck conducts research in the field of multimodal interaction, focusing in particular on the coordination of language, gesture and gaze, as well as the social meaning of actions in communication. He has contributed to the development of multimodal interaction research and engages with the connections between language, music and orality, particularly in hip-hop. His academic work has been recognised with several awards, including the Georg-Gottfried-Gervinus Fellowship (2013–2014). He was a Fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF) in Bielefeld.
Streeck received his doctorate in 1981 from the Free University of Berlin in linguistics and has been Professor of Communication Studies in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Texas at Austin since 2013. Previously he was Associate Professor in the same department and also held a professorship in linguistics at the Free University of Berlin. In addition, he has held visiting professorships and fellowships at universities including the University of Oldenburg, the University of Vienna and the University of Utrecht.
Among his major publications is the 2009 book Gesturecraft: The Manu-facture of Meaning, in which Streeck examines how hand gestures in communication represent and interpret the world, drawing on microethnographic research and theories of cognition and interaction. In the 2017 volume Self-Making Man: A Day of Action, Life, and Language, Jürgen Streeck analyses how a car mechanic in Texas constructs his social world and identity through gestures, language and actions in communication.
Prof. Dr. Christopher Salter
University Research Chair in New Media, Technology and the Senses
Chris Salter is an artist, University Research Chair in New Media, Technology and the Senses, Professor of Computation Arts in the Department of Design and Computation Arts, Co-Director of the Hexagram Network for Research-Creation in Media Art, Design, Digital Culture and Technology, Director of Hexagram Concordia and Associate Director, Milieux Institute for Arts,Culture and Technology.
Salter studied economics and philosophy at Emory University and received his Ph.D. in theater directing and dramatic theory/criticism at Stanford University where he also worked and researched at CCRMA (Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics). At Stanford, Salter studied with former Brecht assistant Carl Weber as well as pioneers of digital synthesis John Chowning, Max Matthews and Chris Chafe. In the 1990s, he collaborated with theater director Peter Sellars and choreographer William Forsythe/Frankfurt Ballet. He was visiting professor in music, graduate studies and digital media at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) before joining Concordia University’s Faculty of Fine Arts in 2005. He was also Guest Professor at the KhM in Cologne in 2010 and is continuing Guest Faculty at the Masters program in Media Arts History, Institute für Bildwissenschaften,Donau University, Krems, Austria.
Salter’s large scale installations, performative environments and research focuses on and challenges human perception, merging haptic, visual, acoustic and other sensory phenomena. Exploring the borders between the senses, art, design and new technologies, his immersive and physically experiential works are informed by theater, architecture, visual art, computer music, perceptual psychology, cultural theory and engineering and are developed in collaboration with anthropologists, historians, philosophers, engineers,artists and designers.
His work has been shown at major international exhibitions and festivals in over a dozen countries including the 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale (Venice), Wiener Festwochen (Vienna), Berliner Festspiele/Martin Gropius Bau (Berlin), Musée d’Art Contemporain (Montréal),National Art Museum of China (Beijing), Lille 3000 (Lille), Chronus Art Centre (Shanghai), Fondarie Darling (International Biennale of Electronics Arts – Montreal),HAU3 (Berlin), Laboral Centro de Arte y Creacion Industriel (Gijon, Spain),Nuit Blanche (Paris), Vitra Design Museum (Germany), EXIT Festival (Maison des Arts, Creteil-Paris), STRP Biennale (Eindhoven), Ars Electronica (Linz), Pact Zollverein (Essen, Germany), CTM (Berlin), Villette Numerique (Paris),TodaysArt (the Hague), Todays Art.jp (Tokyo), Meta.Morf (Norway), MoisMulti(Quebec), Transmediale (Berlin), Place des Arts (Montréal), Elektra(Montréal),the Banff Center (Banff), Dance Theater Workshop (New York), V2(Rotterdam), SIGGRAPH 2001 (New Orleans), Mediaterra (Athens) and the Exploratorium (SanFrancisco), among others.
Salter is a regular presenter at national and international conferences, has given over 100 invited talks at universities and festivals worldwide and has sat on many juries including the Prix Ars Electronica among others. In addition to his artistic work, he is the author of the seminal book Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (MIT Press, 2010) and Alien Agency: Experimental Encounters with Art in the Making (MIT Press, 2015).
Special Issue “Frictions: Conflicts, Controversies and Design Alternatives in Digital Valuation” of Digital Culture & Society
Edited by Marcus Burkhardt (Paderborn University), Tatjana Seitz (University of Siegen), Jonathan Kropf (University Kassel) and Carsten Ochs (University Kassel).
The latest special issue of Digital Culture & Society takes a look at frictions of digital infrastructures.
Digital infrastructures often appear to run smoothly – but it is precisely in their frictions that value conflicts, power asymmetries and scope for design become apparent. The latest special issue “Frictions: Conflicts, Controversies and Design Alternatives in Digital Valuation” takes a look at these areas of tension. The issue brings together interdisciplinary perspectives from media studies, STS and sociology – and offers valuable insights into the contradictory dynamics of the digital present. Contributors include CRC members Tatjana Seitz and Marcus Burkhardt as well as our CRC speaker Carolin Gerlitz.
Editoral text:
“With the proliferation of smart devices such as smartphones, smart watches, and smart speakers as well as the ongoing push toward smart cities, humans, technologies, and environments have become entangled in increasingly complex yet seemingly frictionless infrastructures of datafication and computation.
A seemingly frictionless user experience, however, conceals the contradictions, power asymmetries, and polarisations that shape our digital cultures. This issue of Digital Culture & Society takes the notion of frictions as a starting point for a situated analysis of our digital present. Frictions are sites where criticism is sparked, value conflicts are negotiated, and design alternatives are explored. By bringing together research from media studies, science and technology studies (STS), and sociology, this issue begins to synthesise and systematise the structural inconsistencies that frictions expose.”
About the Editors
Marcus Burkhardt is a Professor for Media, Algorithms, and Society at the Institute for Media Studies at Paderborn University. He is principal investigator of the projects B08 – “Agentic Media: Formations of Semi-Autonomy” and A07 – “The Industry of Personal Data” in the DFG-funded CRC 1187 “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen. His research focuses on the intersection of media cultural studies on digital, algorithmic media and the development and application of digital methods.
Dr. Jonathan Kropf is research Associate at the University of Kassel (Sociological Theory ) and leads the project “Music Analytics – The Evaluation of Data in the Music Industry” (funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation).
Digital Culture & Society is a refereed, international journal, fostering discussion about the ways in which digital technologies, platforms and applications reconfigure daily lives and practices. It offers a forum for critical analysis and inquiries into digital media theory. The journal provides a publication environment for interdisciplinary research approaches, contemporary theory developments and methodological innovation in digital media studies. It invites reflection on how culture unfolds through the use of digital technology, and how it conversely influences the development of digital technology itself.
CRC 1187 congratulates Marcus Burkhardt on his appointment to the professorship for “Media, Algorithms and Society” at Paderborn University
The CRC 1187 “Media of Cooperation” congratulates Marcus Burkhardt on his appointment at Paderborn University! Since the winter semester 2024/2025, he has held the professorship for “Media, Algorithms and Society” there.
In addition to positions at the Digital Media Lab at the Technical University of Munich and a guest professorship at the University of Paderborn, he also led the Hybrid Publishing Lab at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg. He received his doctorate from the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture at Justus Liebig University Giessen with a thesis on the media history and theory of digital databases. Burkhardt’s research operates at the interface of media studies, philosophy and computer science. It is focused on the history and theory of digital media, critical software, code and algorithm studies, digital methods, cultures, and computational cultures. He currently lectures on “Prompting as a cultural technique” and “Digital media: approaches and controversies”.
In 2015, he founded the open access publishing house Meson Press together with Mercedes Bunz and Andreas Kirchner, which specializes in open access publications on digital cultures.
Burkhardt, Marcus, Daniela van Geenen, Carolin Gerlitz, Sam Hind, Timo Kaerlein, Danny Lämmerhirt and Axel Volmar, Eds. 2022. Interrogating Datafication. Towards a Praxeology of Data. Bielefeld: Transkript. DOI: 10.14361/9783839455616.
Burkhardt, Marcus. 2015. Digitale Datenbanken. Eine Medientheorie im Zeitalter von Big Data. Bielefeld: Transkript. ISBN: 978-3-8376-3028-2.
Burkhardt, Marcus, Jonathan Kropf, Carsten Ochs and Tatjana Seitz, Hrsg. 2025. Special Issue “Frictions: Conflicts, Controversies and Design Alternatives in Digital Valuation”, Digital Culture & Society 9 (2/2023). ISBN: 978-3-8376-6358-7.
Executive Summary
Digital advertising is considered to be the most essential business model of the Internet. It is based on the expansive sensing of and algorithmic sense-making about users by means of social media platforms, search engines, and smart devices. Behavioral and sensor data are used to determine users’ wishes and interests as well as their personality traits. These are then used in programmatic advertising for the software-supported, automatic placement of personalized advertising. At the same time, tracking and targeting practices are becoming the subject of both public controversy and political regulatory efforts. Online advertising relies on a complex ecosystem of marketing technologies and actors. This subproject will examine these as constitutive of an industry of personal data. Terms such as “customer data platforms” (CDP), “data management platforms” (DMP), and “consent management platforms/providers” (CMP) refer to key intermediaries in the progressive collection, accumulation, integration, analysis, and operationalization of personal data. However, the contours of the personal data industry are blurred. Moreover, the role of data intermediaries has not been adequately explored from the perspective of media or legal studies. In view of the lack of transparency and the complexity of the personal data industry, it is important to ask which actors are involved with which business models, which data is collected, shared and traded and how, and how these practices should be evaluated from a legal point of view.
This is the starting point of the project, which is situated at the intersection of media studies and legal studies and examines the complex network of trade in personal data with a special focus on the role of sensor data. The project pursues two core objectives: Firstly, the project sets out to develop innovative methods to reconstruct and analyze the collection and circulation of data in the personal data industry. To achieve this, methodological approaches of digital methods, critical code, and software studies will be linked with legal instruments, such as the systematic inclusion of rights of access to information according to Art. 15 GDPR or information about marketing parameters according to Art. 26 DSA. Secondly, the project will explore the tension between personalized advertising, the underlying networks of trade in personal data, existing data protection law, and the envisaged development of a European data economy. For example, while the GDPR and the entire approach to European data/privacy protection deny industrialized trade in personal data, they contain loopholes for its far-reaching economic use. At the same time, the constant criticism directed at the GDPR is already leading to its containment by case law.
The project focuses on the networks and practices of programmatic advertising. We will examine which centers of calculation and circulation can be identified and how the actors involved negotiate the boundaries between identifiable personal data and anonymized target group data on a practical level. Following on from this, the study will address the jurisprudential question as to how far the networks and practices to be researched are compatible with data protection law, as well as how “stretchable” the GDPR and the ePrivacy Directive are. From the point of view of legal policy, the question also arises as to which consequences can be derived from this for future regulation that includes or will include laws for an emerging European data economy, such as the Data Act, the Data Governance Act, the AI Regulation (draft), and the Digital Services Act.
A07 explores how the boundaries between identifiable personal data and anonymized target group data are negotiated in digital advertising practices and evaluates their compatibility with data protection law.
Situated at the intersection of media studies and law, it investigates practices of tracking and targeting by data intermediaries that serve as infrastructural backbone of the digital advertising industry.
Focusing on the domain of programmatic advertising, A07 explores the tensions between personalized advertising, data protection law, and the goal of EU to establish a data economy. The project pursues two main objectives:
Development of methods for analysis and monitoring of the industries of personal data
The interdisciplinary project develops inventive methods for empirical observation and critical analysis of the personal data industries through the combination of
Digital methods, critical code and software studies with
Legal instruments, such as the systematic inclusion of information requests according to Art. 15 GDPR or information about marketing parameters according to Art. 26 DSA
WP1 coordinates the interdisciplinary collaboration and synthesizes the empirical with the legal findings:
Recontstructing distributed media and data practices in programmatic advertising
Collaborative analysis and iterative refinement of the joint research approach
Building a network of relevant stakeholders in online advertising and data protection
WP2 pursues two complementary case studies for mapping the industries of personal data:
Large scale information requests (Art. 15 GDPR) to reconstruct how users are constituted and categorized as data subjects by DMPs, CMPs, CDPs, data brokers, and others
Analysis of OpenRTB protocol and the TCF standard to reconstruct data flows in programmatic advertising
WP3 focuses on the legal evaluation of the empirical findings on the personal data industries. Central institutes of data protection law are questioned and further developed:
Personal data in EU data protection and the European data economy
Identity and Identifiability
Problems of consent
Liability and allocation of responsibility
Publications
2026
Becker, Maximilian, and Catalina Goanta. 2026. “Beyond Informed Consent: Consumer Data Preferences and the Case for Enforcement-Oriented Transparency”. In . Vol. 41. Working Paper Series Media of Cooperation. CRC 1187 – Media of Cooperation. https://doi.org/10.25819/ubsi/10978.
Elmimouni, Houda, Yarden Skop, Sarah Rüller, Norah Abokhodair, Konstantin Kosta Aal, Tashfia Fatema, Mahmoud Fawzi, Ghadeer A. Awwad, Walid Magdy, Volker Wulf, and Peter Tolmie. 2026. “Silencing & Surging: A Layered Ecology of Algorithmic Repression and Resistance in the Gaza Escalations”. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 1-16. New York: Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790994.
2025
Becker, Maximilian. 2025. “Der Personenbezug von Daten und ihre Anonymisierung in Dreipersonenverhältnissen”. In Gedächtnisschrift für Gerald Spindler, edited by Walter Bayer, Holger Fleischer, and Mathias Habersack et. al, 67-78. ISBN: 978-3-406-82497-5.
Burkhardt, Marcus, Carsten Ochs, and Tatjana Seitz, eds. 2025. “Frictions: Conflicts, Controversies and Design Alternatives in Digital Valuation”. Digital Culture & Society 9 (2/2023). ISBN: 978-3-8376-6358-7.
Elmimouni, Houda, Yarden Skop, Sarah Rüller, Norah Abokhodair, Konstantin Kosta Aal, Tashfia Fatema, Mahmoud Fawzi, Ghadeer A. Awwad, Walid Magdy, Volker Wulf, and Peter Tolmie. 2025. “Exploring Algorithmic Resistance: Responses to Social Media Censorship in Activism”. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 9:1-24. https://doi.org/10.1145/3710970.
Förster, S., and Y. Skop. 2025. “Between fact and fairy: tracing the hallucination metaphor in AI discourse”. AI & Soc 41: 1685-98. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-025-02392-w.
Skop, . Y., and A. Schjøtt Hansen. 2025. “HOW FACT-CHECKERS ARE BECOMING MACHINE LEARNERS: A CASE OF META’S THIRD PARTY PROGRAMME”. In AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research.https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2024i0.14061.
2024
Abokhodair, N., Y. Skop, K. Aal, and H. Elmimouni. 2024. “Opaque algorithms, transparent biases: Automated content moderation during the Sheikh Jarrah Crisis”. First Monday 29. https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i4.13620.
Becker, Maximilian. 2024. “Menschenfremde Immaterialgüter – Eine humanistische Legitimierung von IP-Rechten”. In Freiheitskonflikte im Immaterialgüterrecht, by Legner / Goldhammer, 59-84. Mohr Siebeck Verlag. ISBN: 978-3-16-163690-5.
Becker, Maximilian. 2024. “Datenwirtschaft unter der DSGVO – Eine nicht getroffene Entscheidung am Beispiel von KI-VO und Data Act”. In Festschrift für Andreas Wiebe, 225-38. ISBN: 978-3-7560-2300-4.
Becker, Maximilian. 2024. “Generative KI und Deepfakes in der KI-VO – Für eine Positivkennzeichnung authentischer Inhalte”. Computer und Recht 40 (6): 353-66. https://doi.org/10.9785/cr-2024-400604.
Elmimouni, Houda, Yarden Skop, Sarah Rüller, Norah Abokhodair, Konstantin Kosta Aal, Tashfia Fatema, Mahmoud Fawzi, Ghadeer A. Awwad, Walid Magdy, Volker Wulf, and Peter Tolmie. 2024. “Shielding or Silencing?: An Investigation into Content Moderation during the Sheikh Jarrah Crisis”. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 8:1-21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3633071.
2022
Bareikytė, M., and Y. Skop. 2022. “Archiving the Present. Critical Data Practices During Russia’s War in Ukraine”. Sociologica 16 (2): 199-215. https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.1971-8853/15361.
2021
Rieder, Bernhard, and Yarden Skop. 2021. “The fabrics of machine moderation: Studying the technical, normative, and organizational structure of Perspective API”. Big Data & Society 8 (2): 1-16. https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517211046181.
