News
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.
→ Website of the Lecture Series
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.
Lecture Series
“Cooperative Methodologies”
Summer 2026
#1 Ideal Subjects. The Abstract People of AI
Wed, 15.04.26| 2-4 pm c.t.
Olga Goriunova
#2 tba
Wed, 29.04.26| 2-4 pm c.t.
Simon Hirsbrunner
#3 Co-Designing Care & Technology: Methodological Insights from Community-Care Research
Wed, 13.05.26| 2-4 pm c.t.
Dennis Kirschsieper & Claudia Müller
#4 Situated, Distributed, Messy: Meme Research in Synthetic Social Media
Wed, 27.05.26| 2-4 pm c.t.
Elena Pilipets
#5 Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis and the Analysis of Technologized Interaction at Work with Functional Diversity & Mixed Abilities
Wed, 10.06.26| 2-4 pm c.t.
Maija Hirvonnen
#6 Counter-Choreographies of Data: Activism Between Platform and Ground
Wed, 10.06.26| 2-3.45 pm
Azadeh Ganjeh
#7 Machineries of Similarity and Difference: AIDS From Its Research Infrastructures
Wed, 10.06.26| 4-5.30 pm
David Ribes
#8 Staying with the Trouble of Personal Data: Data Subject Rights as Method in Conditions of Limited Access
Wed, 08.07.26| 2-4 pm c.t.
Yarden Skop & Maria Boole
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
Thank you, and we hope to see you there!
Media Climate Justice: At the intersection of media and cultural studies and activism
17.-19. April 2026, Quartiershalle in der Ko Fabrik, Bochum
The MEDIA EXTRACTIVISM Spring School explores, at the intersection of media and cultural studies and activism, how “raw materials” are extracted, used, constructed, imagined, and negotiated in discourse. In doing so, it examines the complex interweaving of materiality, media representation, imagination, and the social attribution of meaning. The goal is to connect academic 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.
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
Das Kreditkarten-Buch: Geschichte und Theorie des digitalen Bezahlens
by Sebastian Gießmann (Universität Siegen, SFB)
In his latest publication, Sebastian Gießmann demonstrates how seemingly mundane practices—such as paying at the supermarket or via an app—transform into complex media practices. Digital payment emerges not merely as a technical innovation, but as a political arena in which issues of consumption, control, and the future of cash are being renegotiated.
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.
“Eine fulminante medienkulturwissenschaftliche Studie – methodisch wegweisend und empirisch genau.” – Anna Echterhölter
Sebastian Giessmann is a senior lecturer in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Siegen. He is the subproject leader of the DFG-funded subproject “A01 – Digital Network Technologies between Specialization and Generalization” within the Collaborative Research Center 1187 – “Media of Cooperation.”
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.
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.
About this book
„The contributors to this volume analyze how spiritual sociality and shared socio-material worlds are formed across social worlds, that is under conditions of heterogeneity and mediatized interaction.“
The open access volume “Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship” presents ethnographic inquiries into new communities of practice and enskilment that revolve around techniques of mediumship, spirit possession, and trance rituals in a globally interconnected world. The increased mobility of people, things, signs, and symbols that shape and reshape trance practices and spiritual experiences has significantly widened their scope and outreach. Circulating body techniques, symbols, and artifacts play a major role in the re-organization of spirituality and contribute to the emergence of transnational “spirited publics”.
About the article by Voss und Zillinger
Mediumship refers to practices that can be found in different cultures around the world and throughout history. Invoking, coming under the influence of, or engaging with disembodied powers can take various forms, which vary according to the local politics of religion, social context, and the personal circumstances of the people involved. In Europe, since the long 19th century mediumship has been archaized as “survivals” and premodern practices. Localized at the “peripheries“ of “modernity” and often ascribed to women, strangers, fools, and children, it has since gained new grounds in the trading zones of globalization. This volume brings together ethnographic research on emerging communities of practice centered on mediumship, spirit possession, and trance rituals in a globally interconnected world. We explore how these practices are taught, learned, reproduced, transmitted, and transformed across various contexts, while reflecting on the concept of “apprenticeship” as a process of enskilment.
Marcello Múscari is a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. Ehler Voss is Managing Director of the collaborative research platform Worlds of Contradiction (WOC) and Private Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research at the University of Bremen; Chair of the Association for Anthropology and Medicine (AGEM); Editor-in-Chief of the medical anthropology journal Curare; and Co-founder and Co-editor of boasblogs.org. Martin Zillinger holds the Chair for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. He is Speaker of the Center for Research on Media and Modernity and of the Interdisciplinary Research Lab “Mediterranean Liminalities”, both at the University of Cologne; and Co-founder and Co-editor of boasblogs.org. He is also active as Principal Investigator for the Project B04 “Digital Publics and Social Transformation in the Maghreb”
The “Beiträge zur Praxeologie / Contributions to Praxeology” aim to place practice above all other explanatory variables and to gain, clarify or correct the basic theoretical concepts from this pre-ordering. Both the works of Wittgenstein and those of Schütz and Garfinkel refer to a common Central European genealogy of “praxeology”, which has, however, remained largely unknown to this day. The series therefore aims to develop in three directions: through philosophical theoretical work, through empirical contributions to theory formation and through contributions to the revision of the history of science.
On the praxeological contouring of semantic fields by the example of a camera-ethnographic research tool
By Bina Elisabeth Mohn (Universität Siegen, SFB)
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
The Bundle Explorer: Touch is the prototype of a praxeological research platform for studying situated practices. Its conceptualization draws upon Wittgenstein’s work and his method of grammatical investigation. With its pool of diverse filmic ‘prepared specimens’ from the research project Early Childhood and Smartphone, the tool facilitates a comparative, probing, and contouring procedure that opens up new perspectives on touch practices in digital everyday life. This working paper recounts the context and process of the Bundle Explorer’s development, and outlines how to work with it. Considering grammatical investigation (Wittgenstein), praxeological bundle theory (drawing on Schatzki), and camera ethnography alongside one another, the paper develops methodological proposals for ways to address the following questions: How can a language-game analysis be deployed to study nonverbal practices, and how can bundle theory serve to discern how practices are situated? How can we bring Schatzki’s flat ontology together with Wittgensteinian thought, and to what extent can Wittgenstein’s übersichtliche Darstellung be seen as an experimental field that transcends medial and cultural boundaries? How could presentational grammar work? In this paper, the term ‘touch’ stands as a proxy for changing semantic fields in changing lifeworlds.
About the author
Bina Elisabeth Mohn (Ph.D., Berlin) is a cultural anthropologist and founder of camera ethnography, a cinematic research approach that aims to make epistemic things visible. Her work focuses on nonverbal practices and (media) ethnographic methodology. As a researcher, she has been involved in the SFB Media of Cooperation from 2016 to 2023. In 2023, her book Camera Ethnography: Ethnographic Research in the Mode of Showing: Programmatics and Practice was published. Bina Elisabeth Mohn was a project team member for Project B05 until the end of 2023.
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.
University of Amsterdam proved to be an eye-opening experience. Around 200
researchers and practitioners from universities across countries including
Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, the United States, and Canada gathered to
collaboratively work on nine research projects. One of the projects was
“Auditing the Analyst: What Do LLMs See (and Miss)? ”.
“Auditing the Analyst”
Rosas, and Irène Girard. Our team consisted of 20 researchers from diverse
disciplinary backgrounds and was evenly divided into two sub-teams. The
project focused on investigating the use of large language models (LLMs),
such as Gemini, to analyze a corpus of 1,000 semi-structured anthropic
interviews generated by a Claude-AI interviewer. Using Grounded Theory as
our methodological framework, we conducted a comparative analysis between a
fully automated, machine-only analytical approach and a human–machine hybrid
approach that incorporated human oversight and intervention. Beyond
procedural outcomes, we critically examined how theory generation differed
across these two modes of analysis.
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.
Initiative (DMI), Amsterdam, dedicated to developing techniques for
Internet-related research and to the study of the natively digital. The
Digital Methods Initiative also hosts the annual Digital Methods Summer
Schools, which are intensive, full-time programs held in July.
by Tahereh Aboofazeli & Arjang Omrani
The exhibition “WE ARE NOT CARPETS: I tell you my story” took place from October 6 to 31, 2025, at the poool art space in Siegen. The exhibition was curated by Tahereh Aboofazeli (University of Cologne) and Arjang Omrani (Ghent University) in cooperation with the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1187) “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen.
The Affect of a Torn Carpet
A 12-meter handwoven carpet, relatively intact, torn into pieces and hung on the exhibition wall.
At first glance, it provokes feelings of pity and protest. Many visitors repeatedly confront us with the question: “Why did you tear the carpet apart?”
We responded with a question in return: “Why are you moved by its tearing?”
In mourning the loss of a handcrafted object and the hard labor of a weaver, the question arises: Whose labor has been lost? Which weaver?
Before the carpet was torn, what presence or share did that unknown weaver have in the moments of delight and admiration for its beauty-
in its buying and selling,
in its being touched, experienced, and cared for?
For most of our audience, this was the first reflective encounter with the anonymity of the weaver, revealing the depth of her distance from the system of production, commerce, and aesthetics that surrounds the carpet.
The stories of anonymous weavers – speaking of their hatred for the carpet, scattered among the torn pieces, imbue the visual pleasure drawn from the colorful, patterned world of the carpet market with a sense of shame.
It was the first encounter with the dissensus we seek to bring to the scene and share with the public: the space between the reality that exists within the current regime of carpet production and trade, and the reality we believe ought to exist.
Confronting culture and power
Drawing on the conceptual framework of shared anthropology, our project positions itself at the intersection of critical public anthropology and critical public pedagogy. These fields share a commitment to critically conscious, engaged, and animating practices that intervene in the public domain, confronting the contested role of culture in the production, distribution, and regulation of power. Within this framework, knowledge is conceived as co-authored—not produced by the anthropologist alone, but generated through processes of “sharing-the-anthropology.”
This approach treats multimodal narratives and artistic forms not as mere “objects” or “outputs” of research but as modes of inquiry—as ways of practicing knowledge, mediating it, and circulating it beyond academic enclaves. Such circulation is not only vital for making scholarly insights publicly accessible and open to critique; it is also crucial for connecting collaborators within the project—here, the weavers—to the networks of knowledge and power that typically exclude them. In this sense, the anthropologist’s role becomes one of mediating and curating these encounters, working to narrow structural distances rather than to reproduce them.
The Weaving Memories project, defined from the outset as an intervention in the handmade carpet production regime, thus seeks not only to render visible the conditions of labor but to unsettle its epistemic hierarchies: to create alternative spaces where weavers’ knowledge, narratives, and aesthetic decisions can reconfigure the terms through which carpets—and their makers—are understood.
Emergence of a New Literacy
The audience’s encounter, however, is not limited to confronting the anonymity and invisibility of the weaver. In Weaving Memories, we intervened in the relationship between the weaver and the carpet by asking: What would happen if, instead of pre-designed, commissioned patterns, one were to weave one’s own narratives and ideas? The exhibition staged the public’s encounter with precisely this intervention: What if that anonymous weaver had woven her own carpet?
After spending nearly an hour in the exhibition in Siegen and looking closely at the carpets, one visitor remarked: “I feel that engaging with these carpets—and with what they bring forth—requires a new kind of literacy, one that I must first learn by immersing myself among them and then slowly acquire in order to relate to them.”
In our view, the audience’s presence in the exhibition is not merely an encounter with the weaver and her narrative, but an encounter with a mode of narrating and an aesthetic form through which she has chosen to intertwine her knowledge of life and of weaving. It is an encounter with a new literacy and discourse introduced by the weaver herself.
Die Kurator/innen Tahereh Aboofazeli und Arjang Omrani bei der Ausstellungseröffnung
(© Karina Kirsten, SFB 1187, Universität Siegen)
About the exhibition
The exhibition “WE ARE NOT CARPETS: I tell you my story” took place from October 6 to 31, 2025, at the poool art space in Siegen. The exhibition was curated by Tahereh Aboofazeli (University of Cologne) and Arjang Omrani (Ghent University) in cooperation with the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Centre (SFB 1187) “Media of Cooperation” at the University of Siegen.
Five artist weavers from the North Khorasan region of Iran participated in the exhibition, showcasing eight life-size carpets and sharing their deeply personal stories. The presented carpets invited visitors to reflect on the hidden stories and cultural connections that have shaped the production and meaning of carpets. The exhibition also encouraged visitors to engage with the trajectory of marginalisation and exploitation of those who weave, shedding light on the colonial and capitalist entanglements of exploitation that continue to have an impact today.
The presented carpets are the result of the collaborative research project “Weaving Memories” by Tahereh Aboofazeli (University of Cologne) and Arjang Omrani (Ghent University). Ten artist weavers from this region have participated in the „Weaving Memories“ project. Among those, the five artist weavers that have taken part in the installation in Siegen were Masoumeh Zolfaghari, Asieh Davari, Saheb Jamal Rahimi, Taqan Beik Barzin and Zohreh Parvin, with Zoleikha Davari providing additional support with stabilizing weaving work.
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.
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.
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