by Annika Gödde | 20. September 2025
The group of female AI researchers will address the question of how human-AI teaming can evolve beneficially over time within organizations. This involves understanding the psychological and social dynamics involved in human-AI collaboration, such as trust, team cohesion, and shared mental models. We will explore how these dynamics change over time and how they can be predicted and explored through research design choices.
We will use scenario techniques to work on potential future scenarios of human-AI teaming in the workplace. This will involve analyzing the temporal dynamics of AI implementation in work teams, focusing on the evolution of trust, team cohesion, and shared mental models. We will also discuss normatively desirable and potentially conceivable visions of human-AI teaming in the future.
by Annika Gödde | 19. September 2025
In 2024, the EU adopted the AI Act, a new set of rules for trustworthy artificial intelligence. The AI Act relies on standardisation, a regulatory technique that consists in crafting so-called harmonised technical standards, to facilitate legal compliance by the AI industry. While technical standards have been used in the past for ensuring product safety, for the first time standardisation aims to foster “human-centred” AI in compliance with fundamental rights. Our working group explores how standardisation processes shape and stabilise notions of justice in the algorithmic society.
To answer this, we bring together scholars from law, philosophy, STS, critical algorithm studies and computer science. We study the work of EU standardisation bodies, examining how technical experts translate complex issues like bias, fairness, and fundamental rights into measurable norms and procedures.
by Annika Gödde | 17. June 2025
The working group will explore how workers in the IT industry are involved in shaping public life. In an increasingly datafied society, we ask how this industry engages in political decision making, how this political economy translates into IT products, and how both are then materialized in the lives of individuals and communities.
We draw on a critical strand in communication research that qualitatively examines backstage practices and relations that translate into the content offered on the screen and its public meanings, viewing IT executives and workers as culture producers. Studying them is of crucial importance, as they now develop and maintain key digital infrastructures on which most other social domains depend, and are in many polities explicitly involved in politics.
We hope this exploration will lead to joint publications and provide members with a multi-national understanding of this topic as we discuss it with students and the broader public.
by Annika Gödde | 16. June 2025
This working group investigates the complex debates on regulatory frameworks for social media platforms in Germany, the United States, and Brazil. We look, in particular, at discourses on the challenges of regulating online speech in a way that respects democratic values, taking into account cultural-specific sensitivities.
Germany’s NetzDG reflects an European regulatory model which has raised concerns about ‘overblocking’, contrasting with the United States’ regulatory model based on Section 230 CDA, which champions platform autonomy and freedom of speech. In Brazil, the debate around the Marco Civil da Internet and current social media disputes underscore unique regulatory challenges in Latin America, where recent violent events have intensified calls for platform accountability.
by Annika Gödde | 23. April 2025
As social media platforms increasingly take on roles and responsibilities traditionally associated with nation states, new frameworks to evaluate their fragility must be developed. Using The Fund For Peace’s Fragile State Index as a model, Haythornthwaite, Mai & Gruzd (2024) articulated the Social Media Fragility Indicators, a set of indicators to measure and evaluate the fragility of social media platforms. Building on this, the working group will discuss and refine the proposed indicators. The overarching goal is to develop a robust framework that can provide prescient insights into the long-term viability of platforms, inform strategic interventions, and highlight cross-platform issues.
To advance this work, the working group will convene a set of international experts from diverse fields to evaluate the sources of social media fragility, refine the initial set of indicators of social media fragility, and devise measures to assess the fragility of social media platforms based on these indicators.
