How do you become a professor and master the balancing act between career and family?

This lecture by Beatrice Schuchardt from the University of Regensburg is followed by a Q&A, where young female academics will have the opportunity to ask Professor Beatrice Schuchardt questions on the topics of ‘Academic career’ and ‘Academic career with child(ren)’.

Beatrice Schuchardt was appointed a W3 professorship for Spanish and French Cultural and Literary Study at the University of Regensburg last year. Until 2024 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Romance Studies at the University of Siegen.

The event is aimed at female academics at all career stages. It is organised by FraMeS – Women’s Mentoring Siegen in cooperation with the CRC 1187 ‘Media of Cooperation’ and the CRC 1472 ‘Transformations of the Popular’.

We kindly ask to register by 31.10. to selina.seibt[æt]student.uni-siegen.de

14:00-15:00 Laura Kocksch (online via Webex)

Title: Synthetic Interlocutors – Sorting ways of employing Generative AI in Ethnographic Research.

Abstract: The presentation begins with a demonstration of two chat bots we developed locally and in-house at the Techno-Anthropology Lab (TANTlab). Based on that it will offer a sorting of analytic ways Generative AI can be used in ethnography, arguing to utilize its capacity to be an ontological provocation, in stark contrast to more common conceptualizations as agent of speed, convenience and congeniality. 

15:00-16:00 Sara Messelaar Hammerschmidt (online via Webex)

Title: Synthetic Feeds: A case study of synthetic methods for studying entangled human-machine cultures

Abstract: This presentation will discuss the results of our Autumn School data sprint, wherein we explored “synthetic methods”  for ethnographic work on entangled human-machine digital cultures. We will discuss what  is “synthetic”  about a “synthetic method”. We will walk through the process we followed and outcomes for the generation of a “synthetic feed”. We will then talk about how to reason about the selection of tools and processing for building other synthetic methods, and touch on their limitations and pitfalls. 

Please register via email to info[æt]sfb1187.uni-siegen.de to receive the Webex link.

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

Session #01: Infrastructure and synthetic reasoning – Understanding beyond AI 

with Dr Amita Kapoor

This first session of the research forum series on Synthetic Methods explores the intersection of technological infrastructure and cognitive reasoning in contemporary Artificial Intelligence. Over the course of four hours, participants will engage in exploration of the mechanisms underlying Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems and gain a foundational introduction to Machine Learning through guided exercises.

The event will culminate with a keynote lecture by Dr. Amita Kapoor, Founder and CTO of NePeur, offering critical insights into the evolving landscape of synthetic reasoning and the infrastructures that enable it.

Designed for researchers, practitioners, and Master’s students, the seminar provides a structured yet exploratory space to reflect on how computational architectures shape and are shaped by human understanding beyond the boundaries of traditional AI.

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

Please note that all participants should bring their own laptops for the Hands-on Session

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.

more information coming soon

Opening

Monday, 10/06             from 5 p.m.

regular opening hours

Wednesday to Friday      3 to 7 p.m.

Saturday & Sunday           1 to 6 p.m.

Every weekend: carpet café with free pastries, coffee, and tea

About the exhibition

WE ARE NOT CARPETS presents newly created, unique personal carpets and their stories, which are experienced in a poetic, cinematic and sensory way. The exhibition shows a dissensus between a carpet and a Carpet, once the weaver binds it with her own name, story, colors, patterns and aesthetic. Through their carpets, artist weavers from the North Khorasan region in Iran tell their stories by transforming their craft into a medium of storytelling and works of art.

“The rug of life became the playground of all I desired. Its patterns – whatever I dreamed of, its threads – -whatever I wished for, its colors – whatever I longed to embrace.

Today, I am the sovereign of this palace, the ruler of my own realm. It is I who decree where each color rests, and where each pattern takes its place.

When the weaving was done, I finally believed in the magic of transformation.

The rug of life, thread by thread, little by little, gently taught me the courage to change. With a soft slope, without battle or bloodshed, it gifted me bravery
And when the weaving was complete, I found myself closer to who I am.

I love myself more deeply, and I have discovered my own worth.”

Masoumeh Zolfaghari – The Weaver Artist

The presented carpets are the result of the collaborative research project “Weaving Memories” by Tahereh Aboofazeli und Arjang Omrani. Ten artist weavers from this region have participated in the „Weaving Memories“ project. Among those, five artist weavers are taking part in the installation in Siegen: Masoumeh Zolfaghari, Asieh Davari, Saheb Jamal Rahimi, Taqan Beik Barzin and Zohreh Parvin. Zoleikha Davari provides additional support with stabilizing weaving work.

The research project “Weaving Memories” presented its first installation of carpets and stories titled WE ARE NOT CARPETS from September 27, 2024, to January 5, 2025, at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne. →website

The second installation will be on view from October 8 to 31, 2025, at POOOL, the cultural project space of gruppe 3/55 e.V. in Siegen (Löhrstrasse 3).” → website

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. 

About | Program Highlights | Registration | Program outline 

About the Conference

The ongoing Russian full-scale war against Ukraine is documented not only by institutions but also by civilians who record and share their experiences via digital platforms. Among these, Telegram continues to play a crucial role as a space for coordination, expression, information exchange, and collective sense-making (Nazaruk, 2022). As part of an ongoing collaboration between 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), the three-day event “War Sensing through the Telegram Archive of the War” aims to re-actualise the role of digital archives in the rapidly changing digital and political environment.

The Telegram Archive of the War (further: the Archive), curated by the Center for Urban History in Lviv, captures 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, offers a unique basis for empirical, inventive and interpretive research into how war is experienced, represented and documented. Our collaboration during this conference and data sprint builds on the previous data sprint with the Archive organised in 2022 (see Bareikytė et al. 2024), and aims to update research on digital platform archives with contemporary questions and approaches.

The final programme, including the Zoom links, will be sent to registered participants. 

Program highlights

The event consists of

• a pre-conference event in Frankfurt (Oder) (22.09.2025),
• a hybrid conference featuring keynote talks and tutorials (23.09.2025),
• and a hybrid data sprint incl. hands-on work with the Archive’s data during the two-day datasprint (23-25.09.2025).

On the Data Sprint

During the data sprint, we would like to invite scholars, artists, civic tech and OSINT communities, journalists, and civil society actors to work collaboratively with selected datasets from the Archive. 

The data sprint participants will explore curated datasets and can join to (collaboratively or individually) work on the following themes/projects: detention and filtration, sabotage, crowd witnessing (cf. Andén-Papadopoulos, 2013) and trustworthiness of OSINT outputs (cf. Digital Method Initiative, 2024).

Data sprint working group projects:

1. Detention Centers

This project group aims to systematically map detention centers established by occupying forces in Ukraine’s territories. During the data sprint the group will focus on the use and perception of detention centers—both formal and makeshift. The group explores the evidentiary and investigative potential of Telegram data in identifying possible detention sites, tracking forced relocations and narratives of capture and imprisonment, and understanding civilian-led search practices to enable advocacy and accountability efforts for deported and missing Ukrainian children. 

2. Sabotage

This project argues that, alongside disinformation, contemporary sabotage and the growing number of unexplained attacks are fuelling fears about the future of Europe, including Ukraine and beyond. At the same time, sabotage can contribute to acts of resistance, which can destabilise the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine. Using data selected from the Telegram Archive of War, this project aims to categorise narratives of sabotage in Ukraine in 2022-23. The project’s overarching goal is to explore how sabotage is portrayed on Telegram and to illustrate its role as a contemporary form of destabilisation and resistance during wartime.

3. Witnessing the War

The outbreak of the full-scale invasion became visible through Telegram as citizens of Ukrainian cities turned to urban chats to share and corroborate their experiences due to the lack of official news coverage. The Telegram Archive of the War creates a unified message feed that documents the chronological development and regional variations of the collective witnessing of the first days of the invasion. The goal of this project is to analyse more specifically what wartime practices are represented in the archived dataset.

4. Assessing trustworthiness of OSINT outputs on Telegram

Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) outputs became an important way for thoroughly analysing events during Russia’s war against Ukraine, such as tracking military movements or crowdsourcing information. Nevertheless, the flood of user-generated content on Telegram raises serious challenges for assessing its reliability and trustworthiness. Existing evaluation frameworks, such as the “Amsterdam Matrix” (Digital Method Initiative, 2024) on assessing trustworthiness of OSINT-labelled posts on Twitter/X, offer guidance but cannot simply be transferred to another platform, such as Telegram, where unique styles, cultures, and formats shape how information is disseminated. This project therefore further develops a systematic methodology tailored to Telegram, aiming to improve the reliability of OSINT verification and accelerate the detection of misinformation.

Registration

The hybrid conference, combined with the data sprint, offers the possibility to join the event in Frankfurt (Oder)/Słubice, Lviv, or online.

To participate, please send a short email to warsensing[ae]europa-uni.de by 15.09.2025, expressing your interest to join the public keynote events.

If you would like to participate in the data sprint, please specify which project group during the data sprint you want to join. We will follow up with more details and an updated schedule closer to the event.

This data sprint is part of the ongoing collaboration between the “War Sensing” project (European University Viadrina and the CRC 1187 “Media of Cooperation”) with Prof. Dr. Miglė Bareikytė and Johanna Hiebl and the Telegram Archive of War (Center for Urban History in Lviv) with Taras Nazaruk.

Program Outline

22.09.2025: Pre-Conference event in Frankfurt/Oder (on-site & in German)

Presentation and Reading with Q&A, 18:00-19:30 CET
moderated by Johanna Hiebl (European University Viadrina)

Das Russland-Netzwerk. Wie der Kreml die deutsche Demokratie angreift [The Russia Network: How the Kremlin is attacking German democracy]
by Susanne Spahn (University of Passau)

23.09.2025: Hybrid Conference in Frankfurt/Oder & Lviv (online)

Keynote lecture, 10:00–10:45 CET [11:00–11:45 EET in Lviv]
moderated by Johanna Hiebl (European University Viadrina)

Telegram Archive of the War – Context and Curatorial Ethics
by Taras Nazaruk (Center for Urban History, Lviv)

Evening Public Talks, 17:00–19:00 CET [18:00–20:00 EET in Lviv]
moderated by Miglė Bareikytė (European University Viadrina)

Labour of Witnessing
by Asia Bazdyrieva (The University of Applied Arts Vienna) and Svitlana Matviyenko (Simon Fraser University)

Detention and Filtration Practices
with Daria Hetmanova (Simon Fraser University)

23.-25.09.2025:  Hybrid Data Sprint  in Frankfurt (Oder) and Lviv (online)

Tutorials on the Telegram Archive
23.09.: 16:00-18:00 CET  [17:00–19:00 Lviv]

Hands-on work with the Telegram Archive
24.&25.09.: 09:00-17:00 CET [10:00–18:00 Lviv]

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

This talk will advocate for decomputing as a means to unstitch the shroud of AI which is being draped over our collective futures. It will identify scale as the core logic of contemporary datafication, and the total mobilisation of human and natural resources as its authoritarian consequence. The seams of AI are already visible in its shoddy emulations and violent preemptions, and what peers back through the gaps are forms of eugenic solutionism.

Decomputing acknowledges that even the tokenistic restraints of the liberal rules-based order and its regulatory frameworks have little traction in the current moment. It draws instead on concepts from degrowth and systemic transformation to challenge the inevitability of AI’s accelerationism. Decomputing seeks to apply the intentional seamfulness of conviviality through mechanisms such as the matrix of convivial technology, while recognising that this will require the counter-power of collectively organised resistance. 

Decomputing is an assembly point for all those drawn into conflict with AI’s technopolitics, such as environmental, feminist and decolonical social movements. In particular, it seeks to develop situated forms of social decision-making that disable future attempts at a computationally-assisted coup d’etat.

Dan McQuillan is a Lecturer in Creative and Social Computing. He has a degree in Physics from Oxford and a PhD in Experimental Particle Physics from Imperial College, London. After his PhD he was a support worker for people with learning disabilities and volunteered as a mental health advocate, informing people in psychiatric detention about their rights. In the early days of the world wide web, he started a pioneering website to provide translated information for asylum seekers and refugees. When open source hardware sensors started appearing he co-founded a citizen science project in Kosovo, supporting politically excluded young people to measure pollution levels and get the issue of air quality onto their national agenda. After a stint working in the NHS he joined Amnesty International and created their first digital directorate. Dan has been involved in many grassroots social movements such as the campaign against the Poll Tax in the UK, and in environmental activism. He was part of the international movement in Genoa in 2001 which was protesting against the G8 and calling for an alternative globalisation that included justice for both people and planet. During the first wave of Covid-19 he helped to start a local mutual aid group where he lives in North London. Dan recently authored Resisting AI—An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence.

About the lecture series

In the lecture series Unstitching Datafication, artists, activists, and scholars explore how digital technologies can be un- and re-stitched by working on their seams. Moving beyond the destructive aspect inherent to unstitching seams and networks, they ask how social and economic relations have been and can be reconfigured by technology in the first place and be deconstructed and transformed through practices of hacking, queering, countering, and resisting datafication and data colonialism – be it through technical manipulations, artistic interventions, or activist action. Inspired by the seam ripper figure and historical forms of technological resistance, the lecture series shows how artists, activists, and scholars work along the edges and boundaries of digital systems. more ➞

Topics can be submitted to the board meetings via the status representatives two weeks before the meeting at the latest. Invitations go out two weeks before the meeting. Funding applications must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation, cost estimate, detailed cost overview, and programme.

Applications  must be submitted at least two weeks in advance via the coordination (Dominik Schrey), including an explanation and additional documents. For further information, please refer to the following templates. Please note that the tempolates are only available in German. For english versions please contact Dominik Schrey:

• Application for association
• Application for funding of a publication
• Application for funding of an event

The board meetings include reports, public topics, and various which are open to all SFB members. Personal and financial matters won’t be public and will be discussed after the public part. Webex links for online participation will be sent out on the previous Friday. Attendance on-site is possible. 

Digital protocols will be provided via sciebo. 

more information coming soon