Events-Archive

Social media platforms are increasingly shaped by the integration of generative AI alongside long-standing analytical and predictive models. Today’s algorithmic systems are moving from the background infrastructure to the forefront of digital social life – intervening in the content feeds as conversational agents like xAI’s Grok, reshaping identity through synthetic likenesses of OpenAI’s Sora-2, and expanding the social ecosystem itself through projects like Butterflies AI and Moltbook, where autonomous AI agents operate in coexistence with (or independently of) human users. As these developments rapidly outpace existing research frameworks, the need for mixed critical methodologies grows more urgent. 

Synthetic social media research takes as its starting point the recognition that platforms shaped by generative AI are not simply data-processing systems but cultural environments organized through algorithms, interfaces, and shared ways of feeling and knowing. Analytically, the attribute “synthetic” implies more than artificial arrangements of collective agency. Rather than treating AI as a radical rupture, it situates generative systems within broader arrangements of human-machine co-creation that amplify specific imaginaries, values, and concerns. Methodologically, it foregrounds ambiguities in how AI platforms recalibrate meaning and how users develop a practical “feel” for algorithmic systems while negotiating their constraints.

Critical digital methods have responded to these developments by treating chatbots and generative systems as part of the research design as well as objects of inquiry in their own right. Synthetic text, images, and sounds are no longer exceptional artifacts but common platform vernaculars, sustained by entangled practices of prompting, remixing, and circulation. Within platform studies, interface methods, visual digital methods, and emerging forms of synthetic ethnography, AI systems have been repurposed for formatting, summarization, annotation, labeling, and the generation of synthetic data, while being interrogated for how they shape knowledge production. This work has foregrounded questions of method: Are we merely studying AI slop, distracted by the automated excess of content stripped of context and meaning, or are we witnessing the redefinition of social media itself along with its affordances and cultures of use?

The 2026 Autumn School edition of the CRC “Media of Cooperation” tackles this question by focusing on generative AI as an infrastructural, cultural, and regulated component of social media platforms across three intersecting dimensions: At the cultural level of everyday use, it refers to the routinized practices of prompting or interacting with platform-embedded generative systems through multimodal inputs. Infrastructurally, it signals a shift in agency, as platforms keep multiplying affordances that nudge us into co-producing synthetic outputs. Finally, it foregrounds research techniques for probing AI models in their entanglements with the platform governance and moderation regimes. 

Against this background, we invite participants to submit short contributions inspired by, though not limited to, one of the following “how to” prompts: 

• How to repurpose AI personas as research personas 
• How to rethink walkthrough methods in light of platforms’ generative affordances 
• How to approach cultural biases conditioned by AI systems and prompt cultures
• How to study AI moderation as platform policy in action
• How to explore platform agency and its steering ideologies 
• How to integrate screenshots as a method for capturing synthetic situations 
• How to account for the ambiguities emerging from human-machine co-creation
• How to develop non-extractive approaches to researching AI platforms

Participants are invited to submit a short abstract (maximum 500 words excluding references) outlining how their work relates to the event’s theme. Presentations should raise questions or provocations rather than present finished research. Accepted abstracts will be grouped into thematic sessions and discussed in a collaborative, dialogue-focused format.

Submit your proposal by 30. April 2026
Notification of acceptance by 15 May 2026
Registration by 15 June 2026

The event opens with a one-day conference and moves into hands-on workshops and project work. Accepted abstracts will be grouped into thematic sessions curated by the organising team. Presenters will be connected via email ahead of time to coordinate their contributions. The first day is about presentations and discussions. The next three days are dedicated to exploring and developing methods – hands-on! We invite you to join a team of interdisciplinary scholars and data designers in probing new methodological combinations. Each of our project teams will present a research question alongside a specific method to be collaboratively explored. Please bring your laptops. The project titles will be announced soon. The event is free of charge, though attendees are responsible for arranging and covering their travel and accommodation in Siegen.

Annual Conference of the project B09 “Bicycle Media: Cooperative Media of Mobility”

Mobility is a cooperative process shaped by a variety of media, social, and infrastructural practices. Cycling, too, is conditioned by the interplay of diverse technologies, infrastructures, bodies, images, and public spheres. At the same time, bicycle mobility is neither neutral nor equally accessible to all: it is shaped by social power relations and diverse experiential worlds.

Against this backdrop, the annual conference of the research project “Bicycle Media – Cooperative Practices of Mobility” (SFB 1187 “Media of Cooperation”) examines the bicycle itself as a medium of public sphere and participation: as a form of mobility that connects people, places, perspectives, and knowledge, thereby enabling a specific appropriation of space. The conference takes as its starting point an expanded concept of media that encompasses not only audiovisual and digital formats but also understands (care) practices such as repair, activism, or collective cycling as forms of mediation.

Our perspective on cycling is shaped by the media. Conversely, cycling also shapes media spaces. In this context, the papers presented at the annual conference examine the bicycle (and cycling) as a medium of embodied experience and perception, particularly in relation to public discourses, emotions, bodies, and infrastructure. The conference will discuss diversity-sensitive and intersectional perspectives on bicycle mobility, for example with regard to mobility conflicts, gender and class relations, as well as unequal conditions of access and representations.

We cordially invite you to participate and join the discussion.

Shared bikes, e-scooters, and app-based mobility services have become a familiar feature of urban life. Frequently promoted as seamless, sustainable, and accessible modes of transportation, such services are increasingly leaving their mark in how people navigate and move through cities. So-called shared micromobility is also a disruptive presence in the street, as it creates new frictions, obstacles, and risks which destabilise habitual ways of traversing the city. Finally, as shared micromobility involves the creation of new infrastructures, it raises fundamental questions about public space, technological economy, data governance, accessibility, and civic participation, which cut across underlying transformations and everyday experiences of city life.

This workshop invites participants from diverse backgrounds – including users and non-users of shared mobility services, residents, policymakers, mobility planners, activists, researchers, and industry representatives – to collectively explore the role of shared micromobility in the city of Cologne. The workshop will use creative methods to observe, narrate, and analyse encounters with shared mobility systems in the lived environment of the street. Through situated mobility experiences, collaborative observation of micromobility situations, discussion, and mapping exercises, we seek to make visible the infrastructures, actors, technologies and practices of (e)valuation that shape contemporary urban mobility.

The workshop will be guided by a series of questions: How seamless – or seamful – and/or possibly disruptive are experiences of shared micromobility in practice? What infrastructures, data flows, forms of labour, and governance arrangements are involved in making these services (not) work? Whose needs, perspectives, and interests are reflected in current mobility systems, and whose are overlooked? How do digital platforms and mobility applications organise – and disorganise – access to urban space, mobility choices, privacy, and participation? And how should questions of sustainability be understood—not only in environmental terms, but also in relation to social justice, accessibility, and democratic accountability?

By exploring these questions from multiple perspectives and standpoints, the workshop aims to foster a collective inquiry into the promises, frictions, and consequences of shared micromobility. The aim, then, is to expand the frame on what is considered relevant to understanding and addressing the impacts and risks of the roll-out micromobility infrastructures. By creatively documenting encounters with micromobility on the level of the neighbourhood, we can articulate digital transformations and disruptions of our surroundings and their problems in a collectivising way.

Artist-led collaborative diagramming and narrative sculpting activities will guide the analysis of our shared observations of micromobility encounters. This shared process of narrative sculpting will inform a publicly accessible report on the seams and frictions of shared mobility in Cologne Ehrenfeld.

The workshop is organized by the project A03: Navigation in Online/Offline Spaces within the Collaborative Research Centre Media of Cooperation at the University of Siegen, which investigates how mobile media, platforms, and digital infrastructures are reshaping navigation of and movement through urban environments. The main organisers of the workshop are: Carolin Gerlitz, Daniela van Geenen, Max Kanderske (Universität Siegen/University of Siegen) & Noortje Marres (CIM Warwick, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/), Artist-Researchers: Yasmine Boudiaf (Ambient Information Systems, London),  & Mukul Patel

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 templates 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. 

“Games and play are at once material and imaginary. They are real – but they trouble commonsense notions of reality; they offer multiple realities of fantasy, performance and intense experience” (Giddings 2014, S. 3).

In der Fortsetzung des Gesprächs- und Filmformats „Kameraethnographie trifft Seth Giddings“ explorieren wir unterschiedliche Spielräume in digitalen Kindheiten anhand aktueller Filme aus unserem Projekt, die wir entlang von Seth Giddings‘ „Gameworlds” (2014) diskutieren. Wir fragen, auf welche Weisen Vorstellungskraft zwischen Körpern, Dingen, Medien und Spielsystemen hervorgebracht wird und wie im Spiel Medientechnologien, Sounds, Spielzeuge und Rhythmen etc. alternative Raum-Zeitlichkeiten erzeugen.

Wir diskutieren den mikroethologischen Ansatz von Giddings mit seinem Schwerpunkt auf (digitaler) Materialität entlang gelebter Spielerfahrungen von Kindern. Wir vergleichen diesen mit dem mikroethnographischen Ansatz und der Kamera-Ethnographie als methodologische Grundlagen im Projekt mit der Frage: Wie wird Imagination von Kindern im Spiel beobachtbar?

Literatur:

Giddings, Seth (2014): Gameworlds. Virtual Media and Children’s Everyday Play. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic

Wer teilnehmen möchte, sendet bitte eine Mail an hoa.mai.tran@uni-siegen.de, um den Webex-Link und den Text im Vorfeld zu erhalten.

The SFB cordially invites you to the oral examination for Niklas Strüver’s doctoral dissertation.

Monday, July 27, 2026, at 11:00 a.m. in Room AH-A 217/18.

During the defense, the findings of his dissertation will be presented to the examination committee and academically defended. The title of his dissertation is “Speaking on behalf of the periphery: Third-party relationships in Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem” and it examines the developmental dynamics of the voice assistant Alexa from the perspectives of infrastructure and platform theory. Drawing on the four articles presented, the dissertation explores how Alexa functions as an infrastructure and platform for third-party providers in business and academia, and what sociotechnical power imbalances arise in the process. This analysis allows for an examination of the social relationships that Amazon, as the manufacturer, enters into with complementary providers on the periphery of the platform. Through various empirical approaches, it is possible, despite the usual secrecy maintained by large corporations, to gain insight into the development of technologies that are present in the everyday lives of many people.

It will be conducted in German and supervised by the two examiners, Dagmar Hoffmann and Armin Beverungen.

Schedule

14:15 – 15:00 Dr. Clemens Eisenmann: “Sociology of Perception”

15:00 – 15:45 Dr. Philippe Sormani: “Relocating ‘AI’: a Praxeological Approach”

More information coming soon.

The GDPR promises us that we can receive our personal data from anyone who collected it upon request. Research has already shown this does not really work as envisioned in law.

This lecture asks to dig deeper into the topic, by approaching data subject rights, in particular Article 15 GDPR, as a methodological device for studying digital infrastructures under conditions of limited access. Access rights are first a legal protection and empowerment measure, but we examine how they can be used to trace tracking practices, data flows and processes of identity formation in online advertising ecosystems. In the course of this research we bridge media studies and digital methods with legal studies. The data collection process is first an encounter with the infrastructures that exist to inform users, but also an encounter of the user with fragments of themselves.

From a legal perspective, we analyse how data protection law conceptualises different forms of identity and how identities are legally attributed to a data subject. At the same time, we interrogate the limits of this framework: while the GDPR presupposes that personal data can be linked to an identified or identifiable natural person, contemporary data practices routinely challenge these distinctions. Identities emerge from combinations of data points that individually fall below the threshold of “personal data,” yet collectively constitute a recognisable profile. The legal figure of the data subject is thus both a normative construct and an unstable one, continuously deconstructed and reassembled by digital infrastructures.

Yarden Skop & Maria Boole (University of Paderborn & Siegen / Project A07 @ SFB 1187 Media of Cooperation)

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 templates 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. 

Writing Retreat des internen SFB-Graduiertenkollegs inkl. Workshop und Einzelcoachings durch Dr. Anselm Spindler (trainofthought.de).

14:15 – 15:45: “Counter-Choreographies of Data: Activism Between Platform and Ground”

This lecture examines how methodological choices distribute attention, agency, and legibility within knowledge production, focusing on digital platforms as contested sites where data is shaped by algorithmic infrastructures, political pressure, and regimes of visibility. Social media posts are approached not as neutral evidence, but as partial and mediated traces of activism.

Drawing on personal research practice, the lecture traces digital content back to its on-site realities—embodied experiences, spatial conditions, and forms of risk that remain off-screen. Through performative reactivation, these traces are re-situated to produce counter-narratives that disrupt the manipulated datasets of authoritarian regimes, transforming research into a site for witnessing, resistance, and collective memory.

The concept of “counter-choreographies of data” frames this methodology as a political intervention that foregrounds the uncounted, blinded, and misrepresented. Positioning research as activism, the lecture argues for cooperative methodologies that make conflicts over categories, metrics, and evidence explicit, accountable, and revisable.

Azadeh Ganjeh (Hochschule für Künste im Sozialen Ottersberg / Mercator Fellow @ SFB 1187 Media of Cooperation)

Azadeh Ganjeh is a Performance Artist and scholar specializing in the intersection of socio-political contexts and the realm of Performance Art and performative culture. Her research, rooted in the observance and analysis of public interventions, protests, performance events and Theatres, reveals the intricate link between performance art and socio-political movements. Since 2004, with her collective, Rebel-IST-hah!, her artistic practice has focused on aesthetic strategies and dramaturgical interventions to create an inclusive space of appearance and activism through the Performing Arts. As an activist and performance artist, her research project focuses on the aesthetics of the performative presence of the body in the public space as resistance. She traces these performances through a focus on non-Eurocentric historiography of civil resistance in the Global South and climate activism in sacrifice zones, which occurs through Performing Arts. Due to the state’s opposition to her secular approach, advocacy for academic freedom, and her active role as a feminist artist and activist, she encountered political restraints and threats from the authorities of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and since 2022, found herself compelled to seek exile in Germany as a Scholar at Risk.

16:00 – 17:30: “Machineries of Similarity and Difference: AIDS From Its Research Infrastructures”

What kinds of practical and epistemic work are required to draw together different kinds of data, people, and evidence? This talk examines ‘interoperability’ by tracing the history of three AIDS cohort studies that, over three decades, were gradually merged into a single research network. Today, with a double-click, researchers can combine data collected from gay and bisexual men in the 1980s with materials gathered from women in the North of the US beginning in the 1990s and in the South of the US in the 2010s—data that remain scientifically comparable. Yet today’s apparent ease reveals next to nothing about the political protests and scientific disputes that made such comparability possible. The interoperability of these AIDS research data rests on decades of negotiation over how blood, data, and human participants could be rendered equivalent.

David Ribes (University of Washington)

David Ribes is professor in the Department of Human Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) and director of the Science, Technology and Society Studies (STSS) program at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is a sociologist of science and technology who focuses on the development and sustainability of research infrastructures; their relation to long-term changes in the conduct of science; and, transformations in objects of research. David is a regular contributor to the fields of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Information Studies. His methods are ethnographic, archival-historical and comparative. See davidribes.com or dataecologi.es for more.

14:15 – 15:00 Dr. Tim Hector: Language and Norms at Digital Interfaces. Adaptation, Friction, and Creativity in Situated Interaction with Digital Technologies

15:00 – 15:45 Dr. Astrid Vogelpohl: Hybrid Spaces – Hybrid Selves
Early Childhood and Smartphone