Collaborative Research Centre Media of Cooperation

📖 new publication in our Working Paper Series Media of Cooperation is out now: No. 41 looks beyond informant consent by discussing the asymmetry between consumer data preferences and the conditions under which consumers engage with data-driven platforms.

🎤 Maximilian Becker & Catalina Goanta: Beyond Informed Consent: Consumer Data Preferences and the Case for Enforcement-Oriented Transparency
🔗 Open Access: https://doi.org/10.25819/ubsi/10978

Digital markets have fundamentally altered the conditions under which consumers engage with data-driven platforms, yet regulatory frameworks, particularly in the EU, continue to rely on consent-based models that presuppose a level of technological literacy and informed agency that most users do not possess. Drawing on existing empirical evidence from five studies across the US, UK, and EU, this paper departs from the empirical argument that consumer preferences regarding personal data are highly unstable and shaped by framing and trust rather than genuine, well-formed values.

Consumers systematically overestimate the privacy protections offered by paid services, accept personalization without understanding its commercial scope, and disregard privacy notices regardless of their clarity. This argument exposes the structural failure of transparency-as-disclosure as a regulatory strategy: informing consumers better does not fix markets distorted by asymmetric information and complex, layered business models.

Rather than doubling down on consumer-facing transparency obligations, this paper proposes a shift toward enforcement-oriented business-model transparency, under which platforms would be required to disclose aspects such as data flows, monetization strategies, but also algorithmic processes to regulatory authorities and civil society. The Digital Services Act and the General Data Protection Regulation already point somewhat in this direction. Building on this logic, the paper proposes further machine-readable transparency as a complement to existing information obligations.

We are delighted to announce the programme for the forthcoming Autumn School, Synthetic Social Media: Studying Platform-Embedded AI, taking place at the Universität Siegen, 22–25 September.
👉 check out our programme: https://u-si.de/OrjWc

The programme contains updates on the event's schedule, keynotes, workshops, and presentations.

Want to join us? Register here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeiUSyl8uXiHH-oNoM-QxIiste9RDWMhT89rxXh9B9DJjDI-Q/viewform

🔥Our conference programme is out now! Register now!

We are very much looking forward to bringing together scholars, activists, artists, filmmakers and journalists to inquire into the politics of media, data, and sensory practices and to explore the role of cooperative forms of sensing and sense-making.
👉 check out the programm on u-si.de/VOaj7

The 2026 annual conference of the Collaborative Research Center 1187 “Media of Cooperation” explores the politics of cooperative sensing and sense-making in a time marked by geopolitical and climate catastrophes, anti-democratic backlashes and the rise of authoritarian regimes—all of which are phenomena closely intertwined with increasing datafication, generative AI developments, and the growing power of Big Tech.

🗓️ 11-13 November
📍Universität Siegen
🔗 info®istration on u-si.de/VOaj7

🗓️ Save the date! The 2026 Annual Conference of the Collaborative Research Centre 1187 Media of Cooperation will examine "Politics of Cooperative Sensing in Times of Crisis"

🗓️ 11-13 November
📍Universität Siegen
🔗 https://www.mediacoop.uni-siegen.de/en/annual-conference-2026/

Registration opens soon

Our 2026 annual conference explores the politics of cooperative sensing and sense-making in a time marked by geopolitical crises, technological transformation, and democratic uncertainty. Across the world, societies are facing overlapping challenges: wars, the climate catastrophe, democratic backsliding, and the rise of authoritarian regimes, all of which are deeply entangled with the rise of datafication. At the same time, digital infrastructures, data practices, and generative AI are transforming how people cooperate, communicate, and perceive reality. Cooperation today takes place across complex sociotechnical networks – from alliances between governments and technology companies to collaborations between civil society, research communities, and activists networks. Digitalisation is built on cooperative media and data practices. Yet today, these same cooperative structures increasingly enable digital political violence. This conference asks how these forms of cooperation shape contemporary politics and sensory experiences. How do media and data practices contribute to new forms of power, control, and digital violence? How do they shape collective perception, uncertainty, and conflict? And how can cooperative practices also enable resistance, democratic engagement, and new forms of knowledge production?

We like to draw your attention to our conference on "Social Inequalities, Membership Categorization, and Interactional Asymmetries. EMCA Analyses and Ethnographic Challenges“

📆 16 July 2026
🕑 1 am - 7 pm
📍 Universität Siegen, AH-A 217/18
🔗 program: https://u-si.de/TIiwH

The highlight will be the keynote lecture:
🎤 Waverly Duck (UC Santa Barbara): “Negroes Gone Wrong”: Pauli Murray, Passing, and the Interactional Practices of Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Power in Garfinkel’s 1940 “Color Trouble”

🕑 5:15 pm 6:45 pm

The conference is preceded by a small ‚pre-conference‘ on Wednesday afternoon, 15 July, following the research forum, entitled: „Navigating an Archive".
📆 15 July 2026
🕑 4 pm - 6:30 pm
📍 Universität Siegen, AH-A 217/18
🔗 https://u-si.de/lAoBS

Annoyed by AI slop? Lean into it with Elena’s Sloppy Research Persona:
https://networkcultures.org/longform/2026/07/01/slopification/
With kudos to the Institute of Network Cultures 🎉🎉🎉

We are looking forward to the last - but not least - lecture in our series «Studying Sensory Media & AI» tomorrow

🎤 Yarden Skop & Maria Boole: Staying with the Trouble of Personal Data: Data Subject Rights as Method in Conditions of Limited Access
📆 WED 8 July 2026 at 2.15 pm
📍 Universität Siegen, AH-A 217/18 & Webex
🔗 info & registration: https://u-si.de/bAlBg

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.

Don't miss the next lecture in our series «Studying Sensory Media & AI» tomorrow with a double feature by

🎤 Azadeh Ganjeh: Counter-Choreographies of Data: Activism Between Platform and Ground
🎤 David Ribes: Machineries of Similarity and Difference: AIDS From Its Research Infrastructures
📆 WED 24 June 2026 at 2.15 pm & 4.00 pm
📍 Universität Siegen, AH-A 125 & Webex
🔗 info & registration: https://u-si.de/bAlBg

Azadeh Ganjeh's 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.

David Ribe's lecture asks what kinds of practical and epistemic work are required to draw together different kinds of data, people, and evidence? His talk examines ‚interoperability‘ by tracing the history of three AIDS cohort studies that, over three decades, were gradually merged into a single research network.

🔥The conference programme is out now!
We are very much looking forward to more than 15 presentations by over 20 researchers that shape the program of the Histories of Tracking conference.
👉 check out the programme: https://www.uni.lu/c2dh-en/events/histories-of-tracking/ -2-october-2026

📅 Sep 30 - Oct 2, 2016
📍 University of Luxembourg

Histories of Tracking is an international conference jointly organised by the – University of Luxembourg and University of Siegen.

Surveillance has become ubiquitous in digital media environments and is now taken for granted. With every PayPal interaction, at the least more than 600 trackers eavesdrop on its transactional data (Schneier 2018). While there is no lack of critique on digital surveillance and its discontents, its ubiquity and naturalization itself require more explanation. Which historical and economical trajectories have led into the current escalation of digital tracking, tracing, monitoring, classification, intelligence service, and advertising? How can we discover and mobilize counter-points and narratives that explain digital surveillance otherwise? Do micro-level media, data, and sensor practices represent “yet another mutation of capitalism,” to quote from Gilles Deleuze’s famous Postscript on the Societies of Control (1990)?

We thus invite dedicated contributions from Media and Cultural Studies, History, Science and Technology Studies, Surveillance Studies, Platform Studies, Code Studies, Socio-Informatics, Law, and Sociology that combine historiographic and empirical work with grounded theoretical approaches. Activist and artistic positions that rethink tracking and/in/as media environments are highly welcome!