Doctoral Projects

How is the digital platform society changing our perception of climate change — and who is shaping public knowledge about it today? This dissertation examines how visual communication practices, new groups of actors, and the use of generative AI are transforming climate communication on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. It shows how visibility, authority, and trust (…)

This dissertation project uses sociological discourse analysis to examine how the RKK draws organizational boundaries, communicates these both internally and externally, and what consequences this has for the institution’s relationship with its members. The focus is on the public communicative positioning of actors within the RKK who operate at various organizational levels.

Given the growing religious, cultural, and linguistic diversity in learning groups—which presents the challenge of addressing learners’ varying backgrounds and needs in the classroom—the search for innovative teaching approaches in religious education is becoming increasingly important. Numerous studies show that the use of escape rooms in an educational context can increase learners’ motivation to learn and perform. However, the specific language-building design of such formats in religious education has hardly been researched to date.

The discourse on the future of AI is currently dominated by commercial systems, profitable use cases, and promises of economic growth driven by Big Tech. Various actors from the non-profit sector and beyond regard this dominance of commercial AI as a threat to the social fabric: systems such as ChatGPT or Grok are criticized for their at times problematic response behavior, while companies like OpenAI, xAI, and Palantir are accused of collaborating with authoritarian regimes and subverting democratic institutions.

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.

Time and temporality are social constructs reflecting the ideological and practical circumstances of society. They are intertwined with other social processes, such as the sociotechnical emergence of automated communication. While automated communication technologies are in a mutually transformative relation with time and temporality, the social construction of time and temporality around emerging communicative AI is (…)

This doctoral project aims to examine how people with a history of migration living in Germany consume news content, particularly migration-related content, and to what extent the known patterns of news avoidance can be identified in their consumption behavior. The focus on migration-related news stems from the realization that many news avoiders feel that the (…)

How do visions of the future shape social change — and how do they affect collective identities in times of multiple crises? This dissertation examines competing visions for a time after a possible societal collapse and analyzes how different actors — from social movements to state institutions — use future scenarios to create orientation, capacity (…)