Doctoral Projects

Grounded in the theoretical premise of platform power, reflected in the ability of platforms to structure user behavior and shape communication dynamics through content governance, this dissertation examines how platform designs and governance strategies mediate the visibility and diversity of climate change discussions.

Political actors use social media such as Facebook and Twitter to influence potential voters and other key audiences such as journalists and civil society actors. This research will examine the self-promotion strategy of politicians from the perspective of visual framing and textual framing on Instagram. For data analysis, supervised deep learning will be used to (…)

The video games “Last of Us” (2013) and “Last of Us 2” (2020) caused heated discussions during their release periods. While the first game prompted players’ to reflect on their moral compass through depictions of difficult decisions in crisis situations, the second instalment, published in the middle of the corona-pandemic, caused a polarizing controversy about (…)

The dissertation focuses on new journalistic tools under the conditions of digital media change. The tools are understood as „boundary objects“ (Star&Griesemer, 1989). Such a socio-technological perspective makes it possible to analyze their (technical) specifics as well as to grasp the negotiation processes in the context of concrete development and appropriation processes. Methodologically, the work (…)

PhD project On the internet, the old business model of mass media is no longer viable and journalism must seek the attention of the audience in the area of conflict between quality reporting and personalized experience. An audience turn has taken place, which is also changing journalistic narrative styles.Hendrik Kühn’s dissertation project examines how this (…)

PhD project The research field of communication and media studies has changed significantly in recent decades with the spread of the internet and advancing digitalization. This applies not only to the subject area itself, but also to the methodological approach used to analyze it. Research software is an important tool in the implementation of numerous (…)

Films can impressively shape the everyday image of mental disorders (mental illness) and develop complex forms of expression for the representation of mental disorders that go beyond the scientific descriptions (such as the ICD-10 or DSM). In addition, they reflect scientific characterizations of mental disorders and open up new, everyday-based insights for the health sciences. (…)

When looking at the interface between school social work and digitalization, it becomes clear that there is little knowledge and even less insight into the interactions between them. The literature states, among other things, that digitalization “just happens” (Ermel 2020: 42). Nevertheless, it is becoming apparent that digital media affect school social work at different (…)

Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, various groups in Germany and other global regions have protested against governmental measures implemented to combat the virus. The Covid-skeptic scene in Germany particularly utilizes the social media platform Telegram for information exchange and the coordination of protest activities. In my PhD project, distinct anti-Covid communities on Telegram (…)

Artificial intelligence is considered a key technology today, even if it is interpreted in different and ambiguous ways. As AI products become part of everyday life, new fears of job losses and promises to lighten the workload are emerging, impacting major public investment in research and industry and being reflected in political discourse and legislation. (…)

Due to promises of groundbreaking technologies and a considerable hype, the issue of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is receiving increasing attention. Besides the focus on innovation driven by actors in business and research, it is primarily political and media actors who take on ethical and legal considerations, such as human-centredness or discrimination, and thus shape the (…)

“Can only a Muslim therapist really treat me well? How important is it that the therapist has the same faith?” These questions come from a post on the Instagram page of a German influencer of Muslim faith. Like many other influencers on Instagram, the influencer “psych.beck” deals with questions about mental health, self-care, nutrition, fitness (…)

Disinformation and fake news are not new, but digitalization and mediatization have taken the problem to a new level. The dissertation project aims to gain a better understanding and possible solutions. Through a quantitative content analysis of fact checks by German organizations, Sami wants to find out what disinformation is actually about. Which topics are (…)

The internet is permanently changing the structure and logic of the political public sphere: the former gatekeeping position of traditional media is disappearing and new actors are entering the arena. Jan Rau’s dissertation project investigates how and to what extent German far-right and right-wing populist actors can exploit this transformation of discursive power relations. Specifically, (…)

YouTube is one of the most popular Internet offerings for young people in Germany and serves many of them as an informal learning and educational space for researching information for leisure interests, school and training (Feierabend et al., 2021; Wolf, 2015). YouTube is a space that is structured along stereotypical notions of gender (Döring, 2019; (…)

“The camera is the inexhaustible expropriator of image-weapons; the projector, a gun that can shoot 24 frames per second.“ The 1960s have gone down in history not only in Latin America as the years of the so-called social movements and the political struggle of left-wing groups. It was about political participation and civil rights, but (…)

When we think of political action, we often think of crowds of people pushing their way through the streets with flags, signs and slogans. However, this image of political action is incomplete. Political action takes place both in the ‘analog’ world and in the digital world in a wide variety of forms. Fridays for Future (…)