| 09-71-KO | Research Colloquium (in English) Mittwochs, jeweils 16:00 bis 18:00 Uhr. Regularly on Wednesdays from 16:00 to 18:00 h.
Ort/venue: ZeMKI, Linzer Straße 4, Room 60070.
29.10.2025: Prof. Dr. Berber (…) Mittwochs, jeweils 16:00 bis 18:00 Uhr. Regularly on Wednesdays from 16:00 to 18:00 h.
Ort/venue: ZeMKI, Linzer Straße 4, Room 60070.
29.10.2025: Prof. Dr. Berber Hagedoorn (University of Groningen, The Netherlands): "Island Memories:
Exploring the Intersection of Local and Digital Memory Practices“
Description: This project examines memory-making on the North Sea islands of Schiermonnikoog and Spiekeroog as spaces shaped by local narratives and visitors’ practices. It studies how cultural memory is constructed through exhibitions and digital media, like Instagram, as a site of translocal memory objects. The research has three goals: first, to analyse how local exhibitions such as the Inselmuseum Spiekeroog, the “Erzähl doch mal” exhibit, and the Koningshuis Schiermonnikoog present history and cultural identity; second, to explore the role of digital platforms in sharing and sustaining memories; third, to examine how analogue and digital practices intersect in the circulation of memory. The theoretical framework combines media and memory studies, drawing on cultural memory theory and media practice approaches. The methodology uses a mixed-methods design: exhibition analysis, Instagram content analysis, and examination of archival materials to link historical and contemporary narratives. The study also looks at media practices of communities and visitors to understand how memory is produced and reinterpreted. Expected outcomes include an integrated understanding of local and digital memory practices, insights into the impact of audiovisual archives and AI in sustaining memory, and a scholarly publication contributing to media and cultural memory research.
05.11.2025: Prof. Dr. Lissa Holloway-Attaway (University of Skövde, Sweden): "Making Kinship and Playing Dead:
Death, Grief, Mourning, and ‘Passing on‘ in Video Game Culture(s)"
Description: In my seminar, I will share some of the context and initial research from my current project “Making Kinship and Playing Dead: Death, Grief, Mourning, and ‘Passing on‘ in Video Game Culture(s).” The project is based on an exploration of how the process of “making kin,” particularly with Donna Haraway’s concept of “odd-kin,” offers a dynamic, anti-conventional, radical, way to engage the world and its potential more-than human intimacies. The process offers a way to reconceptualize/materialize living as we know it. But importantly, it also aims to reconsider dying, and all the ‘passings on’, and in between, the complex and emergent phenomena that sustain these seemingly opposing dual (power) states that all humans inhabit. In the midst of the challenges to ontological being and epistemological knowing that states of death, loss and grief stimulate, phenomena emerge that offer powerful other-worldly perspectives to restructure, engage with, and open social relations. ‘Passing on’ (that is dying, but also grieving and mourning), then, is a deeply mixed material and affective site from which to reimagine and play with conventional cultural structures and agents as ‘we’ have always (seemingly) understood them. In the context of video games focused on death, loss, dying, and other states of un-doing, as well as in my own practice of digital worldbuilding, I consider how, such sites/agents/phenomena may also potentially offer players radical new ways to see, undo and communicate radical affective worlds for inclusion to initiate/sustain new relations via their powerfully unconventional odd-kin. My research on video games, and in my own creative research practice making interactive, play-based digital work, is intended to exemplify the complexity of current and developing feminist, posthuman, and non-human scholarship. But further, I aim to illustrate how video games and adjacent interactive digital narratives may be seen as complex, intimate and expressive vehicles for engaging/critiquing world phenomena through new embodied, non-cognitive perspectives.
19.11.2025: Dr. Andrew Whelan (University of Wollongong, Australia): "Flowchart: towards histories of the algorithm at work"
Description: This colloquium presents research towards a social history of algorithms in the workplace. This research investigates how earlier media of process visualisation and rationalisation—specifically, flowcharts—presage contemporary algorithmic automation. The current focus is on two case studies: the emergence of the flowchart in scientific management (1920s), and flowcharts in military computer programming (1940s). Repositioning algorithms as workplace media, rather than novel technological interventions, redirects attention to the organisational imperatives leading to algorithmic automation. This in turn links critical orientations to algorithms back to classic sociological concerns about bureaucracy (‘government by desk’) and administrative delegation to media. I argue that these case studies invite consideration of whether workplace stewardship and democratic oversight might be preferable to technocratic policy fixes in addressing the issues associated with algorithmic decision-making.
10.12.2025: Guofei Gao (Zhejiang University, China): "Structure and Reproduction of Media Relationships:
Exploring Possible Research Paths for Media and Social Change“
Description: This study explores the relationship between non-representational media (such as microscopes) and long-term social change. Existing media research predominantly focuses on micro-level practices or uses representational media (print, television, internet) as markers for periodizing society, while overlooking non-representational media that span multiple social stages. Under a broad conception of media, new theoretical approaches are needed to understand how non-representational media like microscopes relate to long-term social transformation. Taking a media perspective with specific media objects as research subjects, this study employs “media relationships” as its core analytical concept and constructs a dual-dimensional framework of “media relationship structure-reproduction” to connect micro-level media practices with macro-level social change. The study proposes that: (1) The media perspective comprises two core elements: the materiality and relationality of media objects. Here, relationships are understood as context rather than ontological relations, material properties exist within relationships, and media emerge as non-essentialist contextual formations. (2) Media history is the history of media relationships. Media relationships are both the object upon which media act and the context within which media are situated. (3) Unlike most studies that focus on structural dimensions, this research proposes two analytical dimensions of media relationships: media relationship structure and media relationship reproduction. Media relationship structure (vertical dimension) refers to the structural characteristics among relational elements mediated by media objects. Media relationship reproduction (horizontal dimension) refers to the scale of diffusion and degree of institutionalization of media relationship structures. These two dimensions dynamically co-constitute each other, jointly positioning media objects within specific contexts. (4) Social change is not an external backdrop to media, but rather a process that manifests and realizes itself through media relationships. Building on this theoretical approach, this study attempts to further explore media history narratives of objects such as microscopes.
14.01.2026: Dr. Lucia Cores Sarria (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain): "The Paradox of Negative News:
Disentangling the Dual Role of Negativity Bias
in News Selection and Avoidance"
Description: The role of negativity in the news remains a puzzle in communication research. One body of literature points to a negativity bias, showing that negative news attracts greater audience engagement, while another identifies excessive negativity as a primary reason people report for avoiding the news. We argue that this apparent paradox stems from methodological limitations: aggregate web data and cross-sectional surveys cannot capture the short-term psychological dynamics at play within a news-consumption session. To address this gap, we conducted a naturalistic online experiment simulating a social-media newsfeed and tracked user behavior across an entire browsing session. Our results reveal that the negativity bias is strikingly short-lived: early in the session participants were more likely to engage with negative news, but this advantage faded after the first few posts, and positive news proved more resilient to the natural decline in engagement that happens over the course of the session. These findings help reconcile seemingly contradictory findings in the literature and offer practical guidance for social media platforms seeking to balance audiences’ interest in negative news with the risk of fostering news avoidance. | Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp Dr. Leif Kramp |
