Dr. Vanessa Richter
Research Associate
CV
Dr. Vanessa Richter is a postdoctoral researcher at the Platform Governance, Media and Technology Lab at the Center for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen. Since 2026, she has been working there on her independent postdoc project, “Generative AI & the Creator Economy at the Margins,” which examines the impact of generative AI on creative work and marginalized actors in the platform economy.
Vanessa Richter has been a research associate at ZeMKI since 2021. Prior to that, she worked on the international research project “Imaginaries of Artificial Intelligence: The Communicative Construction of AI in China, Germany, and the US” in collaboration with the University of Zurich, where she studied societal negotiation processes surrounding artificial intelligence.
She completed her Ph.D. in 2026 at the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation, titled “Negotiating the Future of AI: How Societal Stakeholders Shape Imaginaries of Artificial Intelligence in Germany, the US, and China,” was supervised by Prof. Dr. Thomas Poell and Prof. Dr. Christian Katzenbach. In her work, she analyzes how different societal actors shape and negotiate visions of the future of AI in various national contexts.
Research Interests
- Platform Governance,
- Artificial Intelligence
- Social Media Research
- Human-Computer Interaction
- Communication and Media Ethics
Memberships
- Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR)
- European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA)
- International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR)
Most recent publications (Source: ORCID)
- Strategising imaginaries: How corporate actors in China, Germany and the US shape AI governance. Big Data & Society
https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517251400727 - Sociotechnical imaginaries and public communication: Analytical framework and empirical illustration using the case of artificial intelligence. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565251338192 - Influencers’ Instagram imaginaries as a global phenomenon: Negotiating precarious interdependencies on followers, the platform environment, and commercial expectations. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies
https://doi.org/10.1177/13548565231178918 - Imaginaries of artificial intelligence
https://doi.org/10.4337/9781803928562.00024
