Annual Conference 2021 of the Collaborative Research Centre 1187 “Media of Cooperation”, University of Siegen 25–29 October 2021

18:45–19:00   Opening Address
Carolin Gerlitz

19:00–20:30   Opening Keynote
Re-Situating Learning: Historical/Political Dis/Unities of Practice
Jean Lave

Moderation: Martin Zillinger & Jutta Wiesemann

Jean Lave
Re-Situating Learning: Historical/Political Dis/Unities of Practice

A decade ago, I joined colleagues in Belo Horizonte and Copenhagen to invent a collective Brazilian-Danish Workshop. We are now finishing a book of our long theoretical/ethnographic research collaboration. Early on we called the book “Beyond Situated Learning.” But a lot has changed over the years. Theoretically — in the spirit of situated learning — we have pursued a critical historical/political relational theory. Ethnographically — a dozen or so members of the Workshop have produced ethnographic studies of bakers’ apprentices in Denmark, sex workers in Belo Horizonte, bank clerks in Bologna and a rock band in Arhus as it creates music. Others are studies of how children learn (not) to take part in social life at school in Denmark, and (not) to do household chores in Brazil; how children learn to play soccer on the streets of Belo Horizonte but try not to be taught soccer in school; and studies of alienated young people in a gang exit program, an alternative youth center and production schools in Denmark. My part of our project explores the counter-hegemonic, disalienating, workshop-mediated practices of learning in Danish production schools. Theoretical inspiration has come from Gramsci’s and Lefebvre’s dialectical relational method of inquiry.

Jean Lave is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley (Education, Geography, Anthropology). She is a social anthropologist and critical theorist. She taught at the University of California, Irvine for twenty years, and UC Berkeley for another twenty. She carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Central Brazil in the 1960s, and later in Liberia, Southern California and Portugal. Her recent books include Learning and Everyday Life (with Ana Gomes) (2019) and Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice (2011). She holds honorary doctorates from Aarhus University, Denmark and the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

Carolin Gerlitz is Professor for Digital Media and Methods at the University of Siegen. She is Deputy Speaker of the CRC «Media of Cooperation» and member of the Digital Methods Initiative, Amsterdam. Her research explores the various intersections between digital, social and sensory media and methodologies with a specific interest web economies, platform and software studies, apps, social media, automation, accountability, quantification and inventive methodologies.

Jean Lave is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley (Education, Geography, Anthropology). She is a social anthropologist and critical theorist. She taught at the University of California, Irvine for twenty years, and UC Berkeley for another twenty. She carried out ethnographic fieldwork in Central Brazil in the 1960s, and later in Liberia, Southern California and Portugal. Her recent books include Learning and Everyday Life (with Ana Gomes) (2019) and Apprenticeship in Critical Ethnographic Practice (2011). She holds honorary doctorates from Aarhus University, Denmark and the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.

Martin Zillinger is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. His research focuses on religion, migration and new (media) publics between North Africa and Europe.

Jutta Wiesemann is Professor of Educational Sciences specialising in primary and preschool education at the Department of Educational Science and Psychology, University of Siegen. Her research foci are childhood learning, classroom research, ethnography, and digitalisation and children’s media usage in school and everyday life.

15:00–15:10   Welcome

15:10–15:40   Learning to (Fall A-)sleep
Larissa Schindler

15:40–16:10   Practising Being an Indian Soldier
Pip Hare

16:40–17:10   The Sound of Touch: Designing for Intercorporeal Attunement with Non-Speaking Autistic Children
Rachel Chen

17:10–17:40   Panel Discussion
with panel contributors

18:00–19:15   Keynote: Encounters. Praxeological Reflections on the Constitution of Contingent Agency
Thomas Alkemeyer

Moderation: Jutta Wiesemann

In this panel, we conceptualize learning not as a cognitive transfer of information but as an intercorporeal process involving perception, mimesis, and practice, whereby experiences of “being-in-the-world” (Merleau-Ponty 1958 [1945]) are incorporated. Learning takes place when “encounters […] constitute meaning” (Alkemeyer/Brümmer 2019: 5) in situations that are bounded spatially and temporally and bring together bodies and media in co-operative action (Goodwin 2017). Media mediate sense-making in the physical world; the ambivalent ontological status of digital media (Kim 2001) enables them to transcend spatial and temporal horizons to mediate beyond. And yet, even ephemeral digital media are brought into interaction with actors with bodies, always situated in physical space and human time.

Praxeological and ethnographic studies can help us to observe and delineate theoretically how embodied learning processes unfold in digitalized contexts. Three presentations will offer specific empirical examples from diverse contexts, examining: babies’ practices of falling asleep, a co-operative enactment of “being an Indian soldier”, and intercorporeal attunement as a way to facilitate learning among non-speaking Autistic individuals.
Drawing on these contributions, we would like to discuss how established concepts of the body, the subject, and media may need to be revised in order to take account of how learning is transformed in digitally augmented contexts.

References

Thomas Alkemeyer and Kristina Brümmer. 2019. „Die Körperlichkeit des Lernens“ in: EEO Enzyklopädie Erziehungswissenschaft Online. Beltz Juventa.

Goodman, Nelson. 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Goodwin, Charles. 2017. Co-Operative Action (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139016735

Kim, Joohan. 2001. “Phenomenology of Digital-Being”. Human Studies 24, 87–111. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1010763028785

Merleau-Ponty, M. 1967. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge & Paul.

Thomas Alkemeyer
Encounters. Praxeological Reflections on the Constitution of Contingent Agency

The talk will introduce the concept of a conditional agency that takes shape in the encounter of human and non-human participants (artifacts such as tools, technologies, etc.) in social practices. This concept articulates a critique of both the classical idea of an autonomous subject as the sovereign center of initiative and an ultimately (post-)structuralist understanding of subjectivity as a mere effect of pre-existing social structures or practices. In contrast, it aims to rethink dimensions of the social traditionally associated with the concept of the subject – agency, mental activity, self-determination, critical self-correction and the like – from a praxeological perspective. Taking this perspective, people, objects, and artifacts come into view not (only) as interaction partners or as supporting elements for particular actions, but (also) as participants in practices that enable each other to ‘play along’ in their encounters, but can also disenable one another.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Alkemeyer is professor of sociology and sports sociology and has been director of the Research Center “Genealogy of the Present” at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg since 2014. His specialist fields of research are sociological theories of practice, sociology of the body and sport, subjectivity, and contemporary sociology of culture.

Larissa Schindler focuses on practices of falling asleep of (and with) babies. At first glance, such practices might appear to be simply “biological necessities”. However, a closer view reveals that they are socially shaped and thus often involve important learning processes. In these processes the baby and their reference person(s), their bodies and different media (pacifiers, music, books, phones) form a flexible, yet tightly interrelated configuration of mutual learning.

“What is ‘learned by body’ is not something that one has, (…) but something that one is.” (Bourdieu 1990: 73). Pip Hare will present camera ethnographic audio-visual material that makes embodied learning visible: a 3 ½ year-old child and his mother interact with various media to co-operatively perform ‘being an Indian soldier’ with mimetic practices including packing and preparing, taking leave, travelling, advancing, firing and fighting, climbing, and flag-hoisting. Meanings are co-constructed and identities incorporated as the participants practise an imagined future.

The process of learning is inherently situated within social practice (Lave & Wenger: 1991). However, the dominance of speech as an interactional modality may inhibit the participation of learners such as non-speaking children on the Autism spectrum, who are intercorporeally attuned with others through non-speech modalities. Rachel Chen proposes that to create inclusive learning ecologies, interaction needs to occur through alternative modalities that lie within the expressive repertoires of the Autistic individual. What features of sociomaterial environments can be shaped to foster intercorporeal attunement?

References

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1990. The Logic of Practice. Transl. by Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E.. 1991. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Prof. Dr. Larissa Schindler is a sociologist working at Bayreuth University. Her research focuses on the materialities of social practices, particularly in the fields of mobility and learning.

Pip Hare is a visual anthropologist and has been conducting camera ethnographic research in project B05 “Early Childhood and Smartphone. Family interaction Order, Learning Processes and Cooperation” (Principal Investigator: Jutta Wiesemann) within the collaborative research centre “Media of Cooperation” (University of Siegen) since 2016.

Rachel S.Y. Chen is a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University in Special Education, with a designated emphasis in new media. Her current work integrates her background in linguistics, examining the naturally-occurring embodied interactions of Autistic individuals, with a mixed methodology approach through the iterative design of flexible sociomaterial environments.

Prof. Dr. Thomas Alkemeyer is professor of sociology and sports sociology and has been director of the Research Center “Genealogy of the Present” at the Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg since 2014. His specialist fields of research are sociological theories of practice, sociology of the body and sport, subjectivity, and contemporary sociology of culture.

15:00–15:10   Welcome

Slot 1: Enacting Memory, Datafying Knowledge. Staging the Past and Inventing the Future in Two Media Spaces in Morocco and Germany (Moderator: Volker Wulf)

15:10–15:25    Theater as Ethnography in Morocco. Making Meaning of the Digital Age Through (Online) Storytelling
Nina ter Laan & Marike Minnema

15:25–15:40   Utopia with (Out) Technology
Anne Weibert

15:40–16:00   Discussion and questions
Discussant: Badiha Nahhass

Slot 2: Collaborative Curating: Ethnography, Multi-Directional Memory, and the Archive (Moderator: Martin Zillinger)

16:10–16:25   Where the Digital and the Material Meet Up
Janine Prins

16:25–16:40   Decolonizing Research on Museum Collections from Colonial Contexts. Two Case Studies from the Kunsthalle Bremen and the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin
Julia Binter

16:40–16:55   The collaborative museum: Why it needs epistemologies; why it needs theories
Michi Knecht

16:55–17:15   Discussion and questions
Discussant: Anna Brus

Slot 3: Platform Anthropology? (Moderator: Nina ter Laan)

17:30–17:50   Experiments in Ethnographic Collaboration. Purposes, Designs, Infrastructures, Invitations
Mike Fortun, Kim Fortun & Tim Schütz

17:50–18:10   Sharing Contextualized Knowledge: Curating Design Case Studies in the context of an E-Portfolio
Konstantin Aal & Volker Wulf

18:10–18:30   Discussion and questions
Discussant: Matthias Harbeck

19:15–20:00   Keynote: The Techno-Politics of Mobility and Immobility. An Archival Approach
Koen Leurs

20:00–20:30   Final discussion

Moderation: Martin Zillinger & Nina ter Laan

In anthropology, the fieldworker enters a learning relation with the research field and becomes a novice, who tries to understand “what the hell is going on here” (Geertz 1987) and to “trace relevancies” (Hirschauer 2013) through participant observation, informal conversation, and unstructured interviews in order to learn what is important to the people she works with, while unlearning familiar practices and epistemes. At the same time, postcolonial activists and researchers have expressed a fundamental discomfort with ethnographic fieldwork and its key method of participant observation, the forms of datafication that come with it, and the objectification of social practices and social worlds it produces. Ethnographers are often privileged outsiders who operate in settings characterized by power asymmetries, especially – but not only – in societies that have suffered from colonialism, extractive knowledge production, and cultural othering.

This panel explores new forms of co-operation that seek to undo these inherited power relations in fieldwork through three distinct presentation slots (each containing several presenters). The first slot discusses practices of learning (storytelling theater and a card game) in two different media spaces, one in Morocco and one in Germany. The second slot explores collaborative curating practices vis-à-vis efforts of decolonizing museum archives. The third slot discusses three different innovative design concepts for digital research spaces that foster collaborative research practices. All these contributions offer reflections on whether and how cooperation can serve as a basis for decolonizing the collection, representation, dissemination, and authorship of empirical data, and rethinking the relationship between researchers and research partners.

Koen Leurs
The Techno-Politics of Mobility and Immobility: An Archival Approach

Over the last dozen years, I have engaged in ethnographic fieldwork, participatory action research, and interviews involving over 275 migrants, refugees, and expatriates in urban Netherlands, London (UK), and Addis Ababa (Ethiopia). As part of my field research, I co-researched with participants their social media accounts and smartphones. Researching such personal digital archives provides unique opportunities to elicit personal histories and narratives of meaning making. Partly resulting from the challenges in being forced to conduct fieldwork remotely and digitally during the Covid-19 Health Pandemic through digital channels, in the last period I changed my focus towards historical research on elite and subaltern migration in the Dutch colonial era. Comparing fieldwork and personal digital archive research with ongoing research on public and hidden transcripts in the archives of migration, media, and technology in the Dutch colonial era from the turn of the 20th century onwards, this talk will challenge ‘firstist’ assumptions of exceptionality and uniqueness underpinning many critical analyses of contemporary media and migration. In particular, this presentation will compare historical and contemporary migration technopolitics. I will focus firstly on the interplay between the politics of top-down representation and bottom-up self-representation and secondly on practices and imaginaries of transnational connectivity. The talk will explore historical genealogies of migration technopolitics in two interrelated ways: First, the racialized top-down colonial politics of representation is addressed on the basis of a case study on the encounters between the West Indian Filmfoundation (Film Stichting West Indië) and decolonial responses by the Association Our Surinam (Vereniging Ons Suriname). Secondly, gendered and racialized imaginaries and infrastructures of (im)mobility are scrutinized by studying the introduction and distribution of the radio in Indonesia. Radio broadcasts from the Netherlands produced a sense of connected presence between the colony and colonial center, important to sustain mobility. Simultaneously competing commercial, political, and indigenous interests rendered colonial radio airwaves into an intense site of diasporic and local exchange, contestation and conflict.

Koen Leurs is Assistant Professor in Gender, Media and Migration Studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Leurs research and teaching interests include migration, gender, cities and youth culture as well as research ethics, creative, participatory, and digital methods. He is the chair of the European Communication Research and Education (ECREA), Diaspora, Migration, and the Media section. Relevant publications include the books Digital Passages. Migrant Youth 2.0 (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), and Digital Migration Studies (forthcoming with Sage 2022). He also co-edited the Sage Handbook of Media and Migration (Sage, 2020) and special issues ‘Forced migration and digital connectivity’ for Social Media + Society and ‘Connected migrants’ for Popular Communication.

Slot 1: Enacting Memory, Datafying Knowledge. Staging the Past and Inventing the Future in Two Media Spaces in Morocco and Germany

Nina ter Laan & Marike Minnema: Theater as Ethnography in Morocco. Making Meaning of the Digital Age Through (Online) Storytelling
This work discusses the use of (on-line) theater as an ethnographic research tool in a collaborative study around local practices of storytelling in Zawiya Ahensal; a small Amazigh (Berber) community, located in the High Atlas Mountains of Morocco. In 2016, our CRC project team set up a media space in the village for the inhabitants to learn to engage with digital media, while simultaneously ethnographically studying the narratives, practices, and publics emerging around this media space (Rüller, Aal & Holdermann 2019). During the pandemic, (online) theater workshops, led by a theater pedagogue were initiated to maintain a remote connection with the research field amidst the pandemic. The workshops focus on the questions, challenges, and opportunities arising from the presence of the media lab in the small, traditional community, while making use of interactive exercises and local oral histories to give meaning to the social changes digitalization entails. We reflect on the added values and objections of such a collaboration between an academic and artistic discipline in light of existing efforts of decolonizing ethnographic knowledge and methods. The paper also describes and analyzes the strategic use and avoidance of digitalization by the villagers.

Anne Weibert: Utopia with (Out) Technology
Reflective technology-based action, as well as the acquisition of needed ICT competences, are essentially rooted in language and based on one’s ability to talk about technology. Differences in age, education, origin, culture, and language are often obstacles here. Following a participatory approach, we are working on a game that focuses on the development of a utopia with – or without – technology. Teaching and learning experiences made together in a computer club in a socially and culturally diverse setting form the basis for game elements, game rules, event and action cards. As a projection area for personal experiences and questions, these cards create direct links to the local everyday life of the young and adult game players. Thus, with our card game on a utopia with(out) technology, we are laying a playful basis that shows to be sustainable in many ways for lively and constructive conversation working towards reflective technology-based action.

Slot 2: Collaborative Curating. Ethnography, Multi-Directional Memory, and the Archive

Janine Prins: Where the Digital and the Material Meet Up
Digital environments and new media theory expanded the field of visual anthropologists. Next to linear narratives under authorial control explaining realities of ‘others’ to viewers, so-called multimodal alternatives appear, including layered and composited elements, disrupting an authoritative stance of objectivity (Coover 2011). Viewers become users entering layers of materials that evoke as much as explain, subjects ideally become co-creators of platforms offering various methods of interpretation. Different practices aim to reach such goals, like co-creation, design thinking, relational aesthetics (Nicolas Bourriaud), installation politics (Mieke Bal), expanded cinema and the concept of the emancipated spectator (Jacques Rancière). These approaches all became useful when attempting to ‘decolonize’ an ethnographic museum and seeking an alternative environment to reflect on colonial cultural heritage. In these cases things became part of the equation too, with their own agency (Bruno Latour). One experiment resulted in an immersive sensorial experience, albeit based on digital communication characteristics. To what extent such a real-life experience that includes (im)material culture can be transformed into a digital equivalent, still remains to be seen.

Michi Knecht: The collaborative museum. Why it needs epistemologies; why it needs theories

Julia Binter: Decolonising Research on Museum Collections from Colonial Contexts. Two Case Studies from the Kunsthalle Bremen and the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin
What does it mean to decolonise research in museums? In my research and curatorial practice, it means to confront the colonial entanglements of the collections and critically reflect on the museum as a site of colonial knowledge production. It also means to constantly question my own position as white researcher and the power relations that still inform collaborative research projects. And, most importantly, I make sure to learn from my research partners. In our conversation I draw on two case studies that illustrate the scope, potentials, and difficulties of decolonising research in museums. The research and exhibition project “The Blind Spot. Bremen, Colonialism and Art” at the Kunsthalle Bremen and a collaborative research project into the collections from Namibia at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin entitled “Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures”.

Slot 3: Platform Anthropology?

Mike Fortun, Kim Fortun & Tim Schütz: Experiments in Ethnographic Collaboration. Purposes, Designs, Infrastructures, Invitations
In the last decade, there has been increasing interest in collaboration among cultural analysts, and between cultural analysts, researchers in other disciplines, and people in the communities they study. Through an array of projects, we’ve learned that the process and politics of collaboration is far from straightforward. We’ve also learned how collaboration is shaped by the sociotechnical infrastructure that underpins it. In this presentation, I’ll share what we have learned about collaboration through projects supported by the Platform for Experimental Collaborative Ethnography (PECE), a digital research space we’ve built to support collaboration in cultural anthropology, history and kindred fields. We’ll also introduce diverse collaborative projects, inviting participation. This presentation extends from work with the PECE Design Group, and with the design groups for many PECE projects.

Konstantin Aal & Volker Wulf: Sharing Contextualized Knowledge. Curating Design Case Studies in the context of an E-Portfolio
In our talk, we present the “E-Portfolio” concept, which has been developed as a platform for knowledge sharing in the Grounded Design tradition. Grounded Design explores research on innovative technical artefacts as they are embedded in social practice. In this perspective, the quality of IT design and its findings are thus highly contextualized (Wulf et al. 2018). The “E-portfolio” provides access to the documentation of example cases of such contextualized design engagements. Collections of design case studies are documented and presented in different layered portfolios. These allow for different granularities of access to the basic materials and actors, according to the types of audiences insights are intended to be shared with. While the layered portfolios are based on the same basic design case, they need to be created specifically for different audiences in varying social arrangements. We will discuss initial examples of “e- Portfolios” from our current research work. In addition, we extend our perspective to current research projects on storytelling in Morocco, Ghana, and Iran. In these settings, storytelling has a long tradition to preserve knowledge and spread information to different target groups (children, young adults, women). Using these insights, implications for a possible platform using storytelling as an engaging element is derived and discussed.

Nina ter Laan is a cultural anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Cultural and Social Anthropology at the University of Cologne and the Collaborative Research Center ‘Media of Cooperation’ (CRC) on a project focusing on Digital Public Spheres and Social Transformation in Morocco. Her research focuses on Islam, aesthetic practices, politics of belonging, and mobility. Her regional expertise centers on Morocco.

Marike Minnema-Mahtat is a Dutch theater pedagogue, specialized in socially engaged theater and oral history and has founded AJRU – Theater of the Oppressed in Rabat, Morocco. She has conducted socially-engaged and research-informed theater projects and has given online theater workshops during the pandemic. Through the University of Cologne, she is involved as a freelancer in the project Digital Public Spheres and Social Transformation in Morocco.

Anne Weibert is a research associate at the Institute for Information Systems and New Media, University of Siegen. Her research interest is in computer-based collaborative project work and inherent processes of technology appropriation, intercultural learning and community-building. She has conducted participatory design works with children and adults in socially and culturally diverse settings.

Janine Prins is a cultural anthropologist at Leiden University and an independent filmmaker. She operates both practically and theoretically on the intersections between film, art, and anthropology. Her latest multi-screen heritage project ‘Legacy of Silence’ involves installation practices, developed during a stay in Brussels with SIC (www.soundimageculture.org). During 2013-2016 she was engaged in museum practices for RICHES (ERC Seventh Framework Program) at the Dutch Waag Society as a research fellow.

Julia Binter is provenance researcher at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin where she coordinates a collaborative research project on collections from Namibia at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin. She studied cultural anthropology, as well as theatre, film and media studies in Vienna, Paris, Brussels, and Oxford, where she completed her Ph.D. on transatlantic trade, cultural exchange, and memory in the Niger Delta. She worked in numerous museums including the Kunsthalle Bremen, where she curated the exhibition “The Blind Spot. Bremen Colonialism and Art.”

Mike Fortun is a cultural anthropologist and faculty member in the Department of Anthropology, University of California Irvine. His research examines the history, cultures, data practices and politics of the life sciences.

Kim Fortun is a cultural anthropologist and faculty member in the Department of Anthropology, University of California Irvine. Her research examines environmental and disaster vulnerability and associated data practices and knowledge forms.

Tim Schütz is a cultural anthropologist and faculty member in the Department of Anthropology, University of California Irvine. His research examines diverse civic data practices and infrastructures, currently focused on transnational environmental movements.

Konstantin Aal is a PhD student at the chair for Information Systems and New Media at the University of Siegen. His main research focus is fall prevention with older adults and the usage of Social Media. He is also part of come_IN, a research project which founded several computer clubs for children and their relatives.

Volker Wulf is a computer scientist with an interest in in the area of IT system design in real-world contexts, and a special focus on flexible software architecture which can be adapted by end-users, as well as methods of user-oriented software development and introduction processes; he is head of the Institute for Information Systems and New Media at the University of Siegen.

Koen Leurs is Assistant Professor in Gender, Media and Migration Studies at the Graduate Gender Program, Department of Media and Culture, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. Leurs research and teaching interests include migration, gender, cities and youth culture as well as research ethics, creative, participatory, and digital methods. He is the chair of the European Communication Research and Education (ECREA), Diaspora, Migration, and the Media section. Relevant publications include the books Digital Passages. Migrant Youth 2.0 (Amsterdam University Press, 2015), and Digital Migration Studies (forthcoming with Sage 2022). He also co-edited the Sage Handbook of Media and Migration (Sage, 2020) and special issues ‘Forced migration and digital connectivity’ for Social Media + Society and ‘Connected migrants’ for Popular Communication.

Discussants

Badiha Nahhass is a Professor of Social Sciences at the Institute of Scientific Research at the University Mohammed in Rabat, Morocco. Her research focuses on museums, memory practices, and heritage in the Rif, Morocco.

Anna Brus is art historian and lecturer at the University of Cologne. Her research and curatorial work focuses on the intersections between art history and anthropology. She investigates in exhibition practices of modernity, the entangled history of post/colonial collections and their echo in a post-migrant present. She curated the exhibition „Spectral-White. The Appearance of Colonial Europeans“ at HKW, Berlin (2019 – 2020, together with Anselm Franke) and is a member of the DCNtR blog collective (https://boasblogs.org/). Upcoming publications include the journal “The Post/Colonial Museum” (Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, 2022). She is currently working for the Brücke Museum on provenance, polyphonic re-activation and digitization of the colonial collection of Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

Matthias Harbeck is a research librarian at the University Library of the Humboldt University in Berlin. He holds a Master in history, political sciences and cultural anthropology in Hamburg and Leiden, and a Master of library and information sciences at the Humboldt-University of Berlin, where he works as subject librarian for social and cultural anthropology. He is also head of the Specialized Information Service for Social and Cultural Anthropology (FID SKA). He has been working on a dissertation on images of Germans in US mainstream comic books since 1945 in collaboration with the center for historical stereotype research in Oldenburg.

Martin Zillinger is Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Cologne. His research focuses on religion, migration and new (media) publics between North Africa and Europe.

15:00–15:10   Welcome

15:10–15:40   Facilitating Data Sense-Making for Civic Empowerment
Annika Wolff

15:40–16:10   Taking on Femininities+ for Cross Cultural Learning
Jennifer Rode

16:30–17:00   Making, Makers, and Makerspaces: Access and Other Barriers
Verena Fuchsberger

17:00–17:30   Round Table Discussion
with panel contributors

18:00–19:15   Keynote: The Future of Learning and Digital Media. Exploiting and Supporting the Synergy between Renaissance Scholars and Renaissance Communities
Gerhard Fischer

Moderation: Claudia Müller & Markus Rohde

Cross-community learning plays a major role in IT design. Concepts such as participatory and co-design focus on interdisciplinary learning relationships with building up spaces where mutual learning at eye level is possible. With the entry of digital tools into all areas of life and also to user groups that until recently were not considered as target groups of IT production, e.g. people with disabilities, children or older people, a further development of a systematic understanding of learning, IT design processes, and the social space both is situated in is necessary.

Gerhard Fischer
The Future of Learning and Digital Media: Exploiting and Supporting the Synergy between Renaissance Scholars and Renaissance Communities

The wicked design problems facing our societies transcend not only the knowledge of individuals but the knowledge of specific disciplines. Complementing homogenous communities of practice with heterogeneous communities of interest will support cross-community learning as a fundamental aspect of Renaissance Communities by bringing different and controversial points of view together to facilitate shared understanding and to expand the creativity potential of all involved stakeholders.
The presentation will describe new frameworks, new media, and new social environments for exploiting and supporting the synergy between Renaissance Scholars and Renaissance Communities and will include an analysis of learning analytics research to assess the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches.

Gerhard Fischer is a Professor Adjunct and Professor Emeritus of in the Department of Computer Science, a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science, and the Director of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design (L3D) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is a member of the Computer Human Interaction Academy (CHI; 2007), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM; 2009), and a recipient of the RIGO Award of ACM-SIGDOC (2012). In 2015, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research interests include: new conceptual frameworks and new media for learning, working, and collaborating, human-centered computing, and design. His recent work is centered on quality of life in the digital age, social creativity, meta-design, cultures of participation, design trade-offs, and rich landscapes for learning.

Annika Wolff: Facilitating Data Sense-Making for Civic Empowerment
Data has the potential to empower individuals and communities, whether it is data that they collect themselves or open data that is procured for the purpose of providing insight to problems of significance to them. Research into civic data use has typically focused on i) how to make it more easily available – such as through open data portals, or ii) how to support its collection – such as through survey instruments and sensor technologies. However, people are often uncomfortable when it comes to making sense of data. In many cases, this is related to a lack of data literacy skills associated with understanding the typical sensemaking processes required when encountering a dataset for the first time, essentially how to take that leap into the unknown. This presentation will unpick these issues, first identifying common stumbling blocks for data sensemaking during a typical data lifecycle and then outlining approaches – based on combining arts-based methods with data literacy techniques – that are aimed at lowering barriers to data participation. The talk will conclude by emphasizing again the importance of involving local communities in more than just data collection. The people closest to the data are the ones who may provide the most insight into its meaning. Beyond this, people have the right to benefit from the data collected from them and about the area they live in, and this means knowing how to use it.

Jennifer Rode: Taking on Femininities+ for Cross Cultural Learning
Presently, in our interests to diversify STEM education we focus on “broadening participation” by increasing numbers of women.  This framing, based on „sex“, is problematic for people of all genders – including women, men, and individuals who are trans, gender queer and intersex. It is especially problematic as it relies on a Judeo-Christian Western framing of a gender binary. Instead, I will propose constructing an epistemology of computing culture that encourages diverse gender identities; in particular, one that allows for expression of a range of femininities+ to more fully “broaden participation”. I will build this argument up on the basis of feminist and queer theory. This will allow me to arrive at the thesis that qualitative research interpreted through the lens of feminist and queer theory is vital to investigating gender-based oppressions and liberations in computing. Reframing gender is vital not only to minority-identified genders but also for giving men in computing a more robust range of gender expression. I will argue diverse participation in computing is vital to educating people to create technologies accessible to all genders and compatible with our ideals of inclusive and democratic computing.

Verena Fuchsberger: Making, Makers, and Makerspaces: Access and Other Barriers
Being a maker comes with a variety of opportunities: access to knowledge, communities, spaces, tools, and technology. Not least, it facilitates acquiring competences, participation in technology innovation and the public discourse. However, making is fairly exclusive; mainly well-educated, young men make use of communities and spaces. In the FEM*mad project, we engage with this imbalance; we seek to identify gender-related barriers and explore approaches to change the situation for making to become more inclusive. In this talk, I will give an overview of insights that we gained through a series of qualitative and quantitative studies around making in Central Europe, such as why women* hesitate to consider themselves as makers, or what role a person’s need for autonomy, competence, or sense of community might play. Further, I will sketch ways forward not only by describing implications that can be derived from the findings, but also by depicting exemplary interventions that we have been – and still are – exploring. For instance, I will talk about the way that makerspaces are designed and presented, how we need to redefine our understanding of “helping each other”, and how we can make sure that “diversity” and “inclusiveness” are not just labels, but a mindset.

Annika Wolff is an assistant professor whose research is in the newly emerging field of human-data interaction, at the intersection between complex data, machine and human learning. Her research focuses on engaging people with data, such as from smart cities, and in supporting non-experts in designing products and services that use data. She has expertise in using inquiry-based methods and co-creation, in developing applications of data science and in the use of tangibles, creativity and games to support learning. She has previously led work in developing and piloting new methods for teaching data literacy skills in UK primary and secondary schools and in understanding how open data can be utilized in education. She has many years of experience working within UK and European funded projects, combining applications of data science to human understanding. She has published in a number of international journals and is an active member of research communities related to community-based innovation and HCI.

Jennifer Rode is a Senior Lecturer at University College London’s Knowledge Lab. Her research interest lies in the area of Human-Computer Interaction and Ubiquitous Computing. Her work examines the values of users and designers, and how those values influence the user-centered design process. She looks reflexively at the design process to see how our implicit biases and practices shape the artifacts we design, especially as we reconcile the values of designers and users. She uses a multi-disciplinary theoretical approach that draws from anthropology, gender studies, science and technology studies, design research, social informatics, and ubiquitous computing. Her research uses qualitative, largely ethnographic studies to understand technology use and values associated with technology in order to create grounded theory. Additionally, as a member of interdisciplinary design teams, she uses these grounded theories as the starting point for ubiquitous computing design interventions that explore values and social justice.

Verena Fuchsberger (she/her) is a Postdoc at the Center for Human-Computer Interaction at Paris Lodron University Salzburg, Austria. In her research, she focuses on the agency of human and non-human actors in HCI and interaction design; in particular, she is exploring the materiality of interactions. She has a particular interest in how physical qualities play out human-computer interactions, such as in tangible interactions, or when making things with the help of technology. Furthermore, Verena engages with feminist theories and practices in her work.

Gerhard Fischer is a Professor Adjunct and Professor Emeritus of in the Department of Computer Science, a Fellow of the Institute of Cognitive Science, and the Director of the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design (L3D) at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is a member of the Computer Human Interaction Academy (CHI; 2007), a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM; 2009), and a recipient of the RIGO Award of ACM-SIGDOC (2012). In 2015, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. His research interests include: new conceptual frameworks and new media for learning, working, and collaborating, human-centered computing, and design. His recent work is centered on quality of life in the digital age, social creativity, meta-design, cultures of participation, design trade-offs, and rich landscapes for learning.

10:00–11:15   Keynote: Error Is No Exception. On Machine Learning, Errors, and Phil Agre’s Critical Digital Practice
Mercedes Bunz

11:30–12:10   Learners in the Loop
Paola Tubaro

12:25–13:05   From Algorithms to Data
Hendrik Heuer and Juliane Jarke

13:20–14:00   ‘What Ifs?’ Path Predictions and Counterfactuals
Sam Hind

Moderation: Marcus Burkhardt

Learning today is neither limited to human beings nor living entities but extends to machinic agents. During the past decade the so-called deep learning revolution led to a revival of AI imaginaries. At the same time critical scholars voiced critique on the potential harms of machine-learned-systems. In this panel our aim is to focus on these critical studies of AI by discussing the multiple and complex entanglements of human practices and heterogenous algorithmic operations in Machine Learning.

Mercedes Bunz
Error is No Exception: On Machine Learning, Errors, and Phil Agre’s Critical Digital Practice

From the lost game of Alpha Go against Lee Sedol to the adversarials breaking down machine learning systems: miscalculations of machine learning systems are a common phenomenons which have in recent years become their own research area. This talk is following the thought experiment „What if the miscalculations of machine learning systems are at the heart of its functioning and fundamental to its learning?“ For if that is the case, a cooperative Machine Learning practice is needed. How could this look like and in what ways could Phil Agre’s “Critical Digital Practice” point to a potential solution?

Dr. Mercedes Bunz is Deputy Head of the Department of Digital Humanities and Senior Lecturer in Digital Society at King’s College London. She studied Philosophy, Art History and Media Studies at the FU Berlin and the Bauhaus University Weimar and wrote her thesis on the history of the internet driven by a deep curiosity about digital technology. Until today, she has not been disappointed by the transforming field that is digital technology, which provides her reliably with new aspects to think constantly about. At the moment, that is Artificial Intelligence and ‘machine learning’. Mercedes Bunz is heading a research project into ‘Creative AI’ with an AHRC grant and co-leads the Creative AI Lab, a collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery, London. Her last publication is ‘The Internet of Things’ with Graham Meikle and ‘The calculation of meaning: on the misunderstanding of new artificial intelligence as culture’ published in the journal Culture, Theory and Critique.

Paola Tubaro: Learners in the Loop: The Hidden Human Contribution to Artificial Intelligence
Today’s artificial intelligence, largely based on data-intensive machine learning algorithms, relies heavily on the contributions of invisibilized and precarized ‚humans-in-the-loop‘ who perform a variety of functions, between data preparation, verification of results, and even impersonation when algorithms fail. Using new fieldwork data, I show that the ‚loop‘ is one in which both machines and humans learn, but humans are at a disadvantage as they lack recognition and cannot build a personal and professional development trajectory. It is therefore urgent to raise awareness about their situation and improve their working conditions and quality of life at work.

Hendrik Heuer and Juliane Jarke: From Algorithms to Data: Considering the Problematic Framing of Machine Learning in Practice
Machine Learning (ML) has become a key component of contemporary information systems. Unlike prior information systems explicitly programmed in formal languages, ML systems learn from data. We discuss why existing approaches are not useful for the critical analysis of socio-technical systems based on ML. We argue that algorithms are not the central issue. Since a mutually shared understanding of Machine Learning is still missing, we examined how ML is understood in practice by analysing how ML is framed in tutorials. As sources of informal learning frequently used by professional software developers, ML tutorials enabled us to gain a broad overview of the different definitions of ML and the types and algorithms of ML recognised by practitioners. Our systematic analysis of 41 ML tutorials revealed which applications of ML are used as examples and which parts of ML are explained how. Our analysis identifies canonical examples of ML as well as important misconceptions and problematic framings: While algorithms do play a marginal role, the importance of data is vastly understated. Most importantly, we find that ML is presented as universally applicable and as something that can be implemented without special expertise. We argue that attention should be paid to how ML is framed and executed as a new paradigm of computing. We conceptualise ML as part of a complex socio-technical system and extend on prior work in critical scholarship by shifting the analytical focus from algorithms to data.

Sam Hind: ‘What Ifs?’ Path Predictions and Counterfactuals
In October 2020 Waymo lifted the lid on their autonomous vehicle operations in Phoenix, Arizona. Throughout 2019, and nine months of 2020, their vehicles had been involved in 47 so-called ‘contact events’. Yet only 18 actually happened. The remaining 29 were ‘simulated events’ predicted by Waymo’s own counterfactual calculations. In these cases, trained operators had assumed control before an actual incident had occurred, thus preventing any subsequent contact event. In so doing, Waymo engineers would then run their own simulation(s) to determine whether a contact event would have happened. Generating these ‘what if’ scenarios, according to Waymo, is ‘significantly more realistic’ than wholly ‘synthetic’ alternatives, and are meant to constitute a central safety feature of Waymo’s autonomous vehicle testing program. In this talk I will explore the significance of these ‘what if’ scenarios, and discuss how various kinds of forward-oriented, anticipatory calculations are central to testing the capabilities of autonomous vehicles. In particular, I will focus on the design of algorithmic ‘path prediction’ processes meant to extrapolate intended road user trajectories.

Dr. Mercedes Bunz is Deputy Head of the Department of Digital Humanities and Senior Lecturer in Digital Society at King’s College London. She studied Philosophy, Art History and Media Studies at the FU Berlin and the Bauhaus University Weimar and wrote her thesis on the history of the internet driven by a deep curiosity about digital technology. Until today, she has not been disappointed by the transforming field that is digital technology, which provides her reliably with new aspects to think constantly about. At the moment, that is Artificial Intelligence and ‘machine learning’. Mercedes Bunz is heading a research project into ‘Creative AI’ with an AHRC grant and co-leads the Creative AI Lab, a collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery, London. Her last publication is ‘The Internet of Things’ with Graham Meikle and ‘The calculation of meaning: on the misunderstanding of new artificial intelligence as culture’ published in the journal Culture, Theory and Critique.

Paola Tubaro is Research Professor in sociology at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris. A specialist of social and organizational networks, she is currently researching the place of human labour in the global production networks of artificial intelligence, and the social conditions of platform work. Her interests also include data methodologies and research ethics.
Dr. Hendrik Heuer is a Researcher at the University of Bremen associated with the Institute for Information Management (ifib). His focus areas are Data Science and Digital Humanities. He studied Digital Media, Human-Computer Interaction, and Machine Learning in Bremen, Buffalo, Stockholm (KTH), Helsinki (Aalto) and Amsterdam (UvA).

Dr. Juliane Jarke is a senior researcher at ifib and the University of Bremen. Beforehand she worked at the Centre for the Study of Technology and Organisation at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on public sector innovation, digital (in)equalities and participatory design.

Dr. Sam Hind is a research associate in SFB1187 Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen. His research interests include digital navigation, sensing, and automobility. He has published in Political Geography, Mobilities, and New Media & Society.