The 70th Annual Conference of the German Society for Journalism and Communication Studies (DGPuK) will take place from March 19 to 21 at FU Berlin under the theme “Public(s) and their Values.” Researchers from CAIS will be represented with two presentations.
About the Conference Theme
The DGPuK Conference 2025 is dedicated to the topic of “Values” and their significance for societal coexistence and public discourse. Current crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, wars, and the climate crisis, highlight the need to critically examine values like freedom, justice, and solidarity. The public sphere and the media are both places of negotiation and implementation of these values, yet they face significant challenges due to digitalization, misinformation, hate comments, and polarization. Additionally, transnational communication flows and the use of Artificial Intelligence raise new questions regarding responsibility and shared values.
About the CAIS Researchers’ Presentations
“When is radical too radical? The media portrayal of Fridays for Future and The Last Generation during the protest winter 2022/23”
Panel: “Protest and Counterpublics in Discourse,” March 21, 10:30 AM to 12:00 PM
Henri Mütschele will give a talk on the topic “When is radical too radical? The media portrayal of Fridays for Future and The Last Generation during the protest winter 2022/23”: Climate movements have raised high public interest to climate politics. In Germany, a number of climate protest groups have emerged with similar goals but disparate tactics. This study analyses the media portrayal of The Last Generation and Fridays for Future during a period of intensive protest action from October 2022 to January 2023 (political decision and protests around the eviction of Lützerath for coal mining), assessing the journalistic evaluation and media framing. Previous research indicates the existence of the protest paradigm, which posits that more deviant groups are presented more negative in the media, because radical protest is perceived as a threat to the societal status quo. This study did not confirm significant differences in the media portrayal of climate movements at the article level. Given the numerous indicators at the frame level, this study emphasises the role of frames in the specific topical context, determining the evaluation of protest groups within the context of the protest paradigm.
“Generative Image AI and Journalistic Image Values – A Tension? Theoretical Foundations and Development of a Criterion List for Evaluating the Use of Image AI and AI-supported Selection Systems in Journalistic Image Communication”
Panel: “AI in Journalism,” March 21, 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM
The panel by Elke Grittmann (Magdeburg-Stendal University of Applied Sciences), Stephanie Geise, Christian Schwarzenegger (both University of Bremen), Hendrik Heuer (CAIS, Bochum and University of Wuppertal), Marcel Lemmes (Eberhard Karls University Tübingen), and Yi Xu (University of Jena) is part of the CAIS working group “Generative Imageries: Challenges and Potentials of AI-generated Images”.
Weitere Informationen über die Tagung: https://userblogs.fu-berlin.de/dgpuk/