
Doctoral Projects (2)

Among Anti-Vaxxers, Esoterics and Right-Wing Radicals: Anti-Covid Communities’ Social Media Activism on Telegram
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 (…)

AI Imaginaries - The Role of (Social Media) Platforms in Shaping (Public) Future Perspectives of Technical Development
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. (…)

Agenda Setting and Discursive Power in the German AI Discourse
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 (…)

The Construction of Mental Health among Muslim Influencers on Instagram. A comparative Study between German and Tunisian Actors.
“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 (…)

Claimspotting: On the Role and Automation of Fact-Checking
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 (…)

Discourse Power in the (Digital) Public Sphere
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, (…)

Gender-specific Subjectivation Processes of Young People in the Informal Digital Learning and Educational Space YouTube
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; (…)

1968 and 1969 as Epochal Years. On the History and Aesthetics of Argentinean and Mexican Documentary Films and Social Movements
“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 (…)