Current and past working groups
Current working groups
This working group builds on growing inquiries into the invisible labor sustaining artificial intelligence and asks: How is human labor organized, formalized, and valued across different phases of AI development? What kinds of epistemic authority do data workers possess, and how are their contributions recognized or erased? What might bottom-up policy initiatives that foreground workers’ perspectives and benefits look like? We bring together researchers, data workers and civil society, and collaborate through expert workshops and collaborative drafting. Participants contribute their insights from case studies and lived labor experiences, which is essential for developing worker-centered policy initiatives.
How do we ensure that the use of AI for Holocaust memory and education is critically informed? How can AI models be used to enhance the memorialisation and pedagogical aims of the Holocaust memory and heritage sector? Whilst there is an emerging body of theoretical literature on this topic, there still remains a dearth of empirical answers. Our working group brings together an interdisciplinary group of academics, from the cognitive and communication sciences, and humanities, and memory practitioners to explore these urgent questions. We will use a design-led research methodology and be influenced by the development of working papers to adopt a mixed-method approach combining arts and science methodologies.
This project addresses the transformations reshaping academic publishing in the digital age. Driven by technological advancements, particularly digitalisation, datafication and artificial intelligence (AI), the scholarly literature is evolving from a collection of research accounts into a data-driven resource.
This century has been the deadliest for journalists while the working environment of conflict reporting has expanded to include civil protests, environmental crisis aftermaths, online harassment, and state surveillance, among other arenas. Rapidly-evolving sociopolitical and technological elements further exacerbate journalists’ increased vulnerability. Our study seeks to understand the evolving nature of conflict reporting through the lenses of technological transformation and expanding conflict environments.
PolarNar will explore the power of polarizing visual narratives. In our highly visual society polarization is often developed by and through images. Images that support and propagate specific narratives about politics, identity or climate. Building on an extensive dataset of European social media visual content, PolarNar will investigate how activists and political actors visually represent issues connected with the climate debate and what role these visual narratives play in the existing polarization around the topic.
In 2022, the European Union (EU) underscored the need to build synergies between digital and green transitions – two paradigmatic shifts proposed lately in response to global economic and environmental challenges (Joint Research Centre, 2022). The working group aims to address the conceptual groundwork required for critically interfacing the two transitions. The key goal of the working group is to build a shared conceptual vocabulary from an anthropological perspective, while borrowing from other allied disciplines, to address the challenges and possibilities of thinking these processes together.
As generative AI transforms how news is produced and consumed, traditional skills – like evaluating sources and detecting bias – must evolve. This project investigates how generative AI is reshaping critical thinking, particularly in journalism, media studies, and education.
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.
Past working groups
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.
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.
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.
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.
This working group explores how academic platforms like ResearchGate, Academia.edu, and Medium shape the visibility of marginalized scholars – particularly women and non-binary individuals from the Global South. While these platforms promise greater access and engagement, they often reinforce existing inequalities through algorithmic bias, competitive scoring systems, and limited accessibility. Their goal is to understand how these digital environments impact the scholarly presence of underrepresented voices and to develop strategies that make academic platforms more inclusive. The project includes a user-focused survey and interviews, drawing from feminist theory and labor studies to evaluate the technical and social aspects of platform design.
This project will research online gendered hate such as digital sexisms and gender-based online violence. They are particularly interested in visual misogynistic practices that “fly under the radar”. These include content moderation of visual gender violence; visual performance of gender identities, i.e. stereotyping, diminishing, branding, reinforcing imaginaries; and the role of aesthetics and design in (re)generating gender violence (Özkula et al., 2024). The meeting at CAIS is intended to provide an opportunity to contrast and combine our collective methods and develop a methodology that better captures the complexity and diversity of cases of Platformed Visual Misogyny through comparative and multi-modal approaches (for which the groundwork has been laid in Özkula, Prieto-Blanco, Tan, & Mdege, 2024).
How is artificial intelligence reshaping the way political parties operate, engage with citizens, and lead in democratic systems? Our working group, Rethinking Party Politics: The Impact of AI on Governance, Membership, and Leadership, tackles this critical question. We bring together leading scholars in party politics, AI ethics, and democracy studies to explore AI’s transformative influence on political strategy, grassroots mobilization, and decision-making processes. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, expert presentations, and hands-on scenario planning, we’ll investigate how AI impacts political parties using Katz and Mair’s (1993) three-level framework: the party in public office, the party on the ground, and the party central office. Despite the rapid growth of research on AI and democracy, few studies have focused on its impact on political parties key actors in representative systems. By addressing this gap, we aim to make a significant contribution to understanding the future of political organizations in the age of AI, inspiring further scholarship.
Our working group aims to bring together a variety of leading scholars from different disciplines and countries to study how industrial policy is actually done in Europe and beyond, and what the specific role of technology is therein. This promises not only to significantly advance the existing and rapidly growing literature on industrial policy and digital policy-making. It will also have practical relevance for the effectiveness and legitimacy of industrial and digital policy.