news & events

How influencer and AI threaten democracies: Prof. Dr. Václav Štětka was appointed Professor of Digital Political Communication at the European New School of Digital Studies (ENS) at Viadrina on 10 February 2026. The communication scientist and sociologist researches the connection between a changing information environment and the rise of illiberalism and populism, particularly in Eastern Central Europe.

• Host: Research Factory B/ORDERS IN MOTION
• February 4, 2026, 16:15 to 17:45
• Hybrid: In person at Viadrina (room GD 102) & online

• Chair: Dr Marija Grujić
  (DFG Walter Benjamin Fellow, Viadrina Center B/ORDERS IN MOTION, Principal Investigator of the project “Gendering Asylum Infrastructures”)
• Speakers:
  Prof. Dr Britta Schneider (Chair Holder of Language Use and Migration, EUV)
  Dr Jasper Van der Kist (Department of Political Science, University of Antwerp)
  Dr Silvan Pollozek (European New School of Digital Studies, EUV)
  Sifka Etlar Frederiksen, PhD Candidate (Leuphana University & DeZIM)

This panel discussion will explore the role of digital technologies – including AI and machine translation – in migration governance and asylum processes. It will examine how data infrastructures and socio-technical networks influence perceptions of race, gender, and migration within these systems. The conversation will also address the use of digital tools in assessing gender, sexual orientation, and experiences of violence, as well as country of origin assessments. The session will critically examine the colonial legacies embedded in AI technologies and how they reinforce power dynamics. We will highlight how these technologies intersect with broader issues of categorization, dehumanization, and exclusion, and shed light on their role in shaping social hierarchies.

On 10 November 2025 at 6 PM, the Pilecki Institute in Berlin (Pariser Platz 4a) will host the launch of the co-edited volume Images and Objects of Russia's War against Ukraine, edited by Natasha Klimenko (Doctoral Fellow at the Graduate School Global Intellectual History, FU Berlin), Miglė Bareikytė (ENS Professor for Digital Studies), and Viktoria Sereda (Head Coordinator of the Virtual Ukraine Institute for Advanced Study (VUIAS) at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Professor of Sociology at the Kyiv School of Economics).

In addition to the presentation and discussion of the book, the event will feature the screening of an experimental film essay produced by Miglė Bareikytė and Natasha Klimenko, developed in the context of the edited volume.

About the publication

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has destroyed lives, communities, and cities. From the start, images of this war spread across various media platforms. Paintings, photographs, drone footage, TikToks, and Instagram posts shaped how the war is experienced, represented, and archived. In this multidisciplinary volume, artists, scholars, and writers explore how art, media, infrastructures, and material culture respond to and contest the Russo-Ukrainian War.

Published by Transcript Verlag, the volume is available open access and may be downloaded here.

To participate in the launch event, please This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

New lecture series by The KIU – Competence Network Interdisciplinary Ukraine Studies and ENS: 

• Tuesday, 11 a.m. - 1 p.m.
• GD HS08, Gräfin-Dönhoff-Gebäude, Europaplatz 1, 15230 Frankfurt (Oder), Germany

Infrastructures are both physical and knowledge-based. Physical infrastructures—such as bridges, power plants, and cable networks—and knowledge infrastructures—including universities and civil society organizations—are increasingly being attacked and destroyed in Ukraine and its occupied territories by Russia's full-scale invasion. As geopolitical uncertainties rise, these attacks are also increasingly affecting other parts of Europe. In this lecture series, we will discuss what infrastructural resilience means today, how it is being tested by different forms of attack, but also how resilience can become preventive rather than merely reactive towards physical and informational attacks. We will focus on socio-technical, historical, cultural, economical aspects of both infrastructures and resilience, and find out what role critical engagement plays in shaping infrastructural developments.

Opening Lecture:

• 14 October 2025, 11 AM
• David Chandler, Professor of International Relations, University of Westminster, London (UK)
• "Infrastructures of Hope and Resilience: Governing Uncertainty"

European-University Viadrina/CRC 1187 project “War Sensing” (led by Prof. Dr. Miglė Bareikytė) and the Center for Urban History in Lviv/Telegram Archive of the War

The ongoing Russian full-scale war against Ukraine is documented not only by institutions but also by civilians who record and share their experiences via digital platforms. Among these, Telegram continues to play a crucial role as a space for coordination, expression, information exchange, and collective sense-making (Nazaruk, 2022). As part of an ongoing collaboration between the “War Sensing” project (European University Viadrina and the CRC “Media of Cooperation”) and the Telegram Archive of the War (Center for Urban History in Lviv), the three-day event “War Sensing through the Telegram Archive of the War” aims to re-actualise the role of digital archives in the rapidly changing digital and political environment.

The Telegram Archive of the War (further: the Archive), curated by the Center for Urban History in Lviv, captures the digital dimension of the war. Since February 2022, the Center has been systematically archiving public Telegram channels related to the war, including those used for evacuation, OSINT, mutual aid, memes, infrastructures, or local reporting. The Archive, therefore, offers a unique basis for empirical, inventive and interpretive research into how war is experienced, represented and documented. Our collaboration during this conference and data sprint builds on the previous data sprint with the Archive organised in 2022 (see Bareikytė et al. 2024), and aims to update research on digital platform archives with contemporary questions and approaches.

The event consists of a pre-conference event in Frankfurt (Oder) (22.09.2025), a hybrid conference featuring keynote talks and tutorials (23.09.2025), and hands-on work with the Archive’s data during the two-day datasprint (23-25.09.2025). The programme outline is shared below, and the final programme, including the Zoom links, will be sent to registered participants. 

We are pleased to host the second ENS Fellows and Friends Paper Workshop on Tuesday, July 1, 2025, starting at 11:00 AM in the ENS Coworking Space (Collegium Polonicum library building).

Building on the success of the first edition, this workshop offers a platform for thoughtful exchange among scholars working at the intersection of law, ethics, and digital technologies. The event brings together ENS Fellows and invited colleagues for a day of focused discussion on works in progress.

Each session in the workshop will follow a participatory format, beginning with a 5–10 minute introduction by the author, followed by 10 minutes of commentary from a designated discussant, and concluding with an open discussion and Q&A. This structure is designed to encourage direct engagement and constructive feedback in an informal setting. 

We are delighted to welcome the following distinguished scholars:

• Lilian Edwards – Professor of Law, Innovation and Society, Newcastle University
• Orla Lynskey – Chair of Law and Technology, University College London
• Jeremias Adams-Prassl – Professor of Law, University of Oxford
• Atoosa Kasirzadeh –  Assistant Professor, Carnegie Mellon University
• Philipp Hacker – Chair for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society, ENS (Host)
• Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius – Professor of ICT and Privacy Law, Radboud University

The ENS Fellowship Program is made possible with the generous support of the Dieter Schwarz Foundation.

If you are interested in joining the event, please send us an email.

On Thursday, 22.05.2025, from 16:00 to 17:30, the ENS Chair for Sociology of Technology will host a hybrid event in the ENS Coworking Space as part of the Erasmus+ Project ETHICS4CHALLENGES. Online participation will be possible.

In this event, Dr. Silvia Milano, a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Exeter (UK) and a Humboldt Fellow at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy (MCM), LMU Munich, will give a talk with the title "Epistemic obstacles to the governance of algorithmic systems."  In this talk, she will introduce the phenomenon of epistemic fragmentation and describe how it creates obstacles for the governance of algorithmic systems that profile and interact with individuals. Using the example of online personalised targeting, she shows how epistemic fragmentation amplifies the harms individuals are exposed to, leads to epistemic injustice, and cannot be tackled using current regulatory strategies. She invites us to rethink a civic governance model for algorithmic systems as an antidote. 

Dr. Milano's research interests are in the Epistemology and Ethics of AI. Her recent work has focused on AI and epistemic injustice, the ethical challenges of recommender systems, polarisation on social networks, and the impacts of LLMs on education. She is currently developing a philosophical analysis of recommender systems, encompassing their social, epistemological, and ethical dimensions.

Dr. Milano was previously a Golding Junior Research Fellow at Brasenose College and Research Fellow in Philosophy of AI at the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford (2020-2022), and Postdoctoral Researcher at the Oxford Internet Institute (2018-2020). She obtained a PhD in Philosophy from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

 We warmly welcome participants from all backgrounds—students, faculty, and anyone interested in the topic—to join this English-language event.

For those planning to participate online, the Zoom link will be published shortly.

Who is conducting research at Viadrina and on what topics? What projects have received funding, and what work has been recognized with awards? And how is the reform process at the European University progressing? Answers to these and other questions can be found in the newly published annual report “Viadrina 2024.” On Wednesday, May 14, Prof. Dr. Eduard Mühle, President of the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), presented the report at a media conference.

The report describes in English and German how and on what topics teaching and research are conducted at Viadrina. Selected projects highlight the thematic priorities of the European University: from interconnections in Europe to transformation processes to shaping coexistence. Innovative, practice-oriented teaching formats are presented alongside award-winning research results. In addition, numerous graphics and statistics provide insights into the structure of the Viadrina, its international network, and the support it offers researchers at various stages of their careers.

“Attractive, high-quality teaching, optimal study conditions, forward-looking research, understandable science communication, socially relevant transfer—the Viadrina sets high standards for itself. The past year was marked by courageous steps toward a new beginning and has set Viadrina in motion to bring it a good deal closer to fulfilling this aspiration,” writes Prof. Dr. Eduard Mühle in the foreword to ‘Viadrina 2024’ about the current reform program.

A printed version of the annual report can be ordered by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

How can freely available sources such as social media posts, satellite images, media reports and Google Street View data be used to research pressing socio-political issues? Two seminars at ENS addressed this question in the winter semester 2024/25. Under the guidance of Prof. Dr Miglė Bareikytė and Dr Silvan Pollozek, students used special research methods to investigate war and migration issues.

The research groups focussed on the use of open source intelligence (OSINT). In the two seminars "How to investigate conflict on digital platforms? OSINT in the context of war" (Miglė Bareikytė) and "Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) investigations in the context of migration and border control" (Silvan Pollozek), the students experimented with various digital tools and methods, tackled pressing socio-political issues and worked on their research projects in an intensive two-day data sprint by collecting, analysing and discussing data. Two experts, OSINT specialist and researcher Guillen Torres from the University of Amsterdam and Galen Reich, tech community facilitator at the research network Bellingcat, acted as mentors for the students.

The remuneration of music creators in the area of streaming, as well as transparency, diversity and market power – these points are the focus of the final report of the Digital Culture Research Network, which is led by Viadrina economist Prof. Dr. Jana Costas. Together with Prof. Dr. Patrick Vonderau (Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg), she published the study “Remuneration in the German Market for Music Streaming” on February 11, 2025. The final report includes a legal opinion by ENS Professor for Law and Ethics of the Digital Society, Philipp Hacker.

The aim was to conduct an independent, scientific study to examine existing and alternative remuneration models in the area of music streaming. To this end, more than 60 qualitative interviews were conducted with stakeholders in the German music industry, among other things, and a Germany-wide anonymous survey of around 3,000 music creators was carried out. The study was supplemented by a legal opinion on transparency in remuneration in the music streaming market.

According to the study, in 2023, 75 percent of revenues were attributable to 0.1 percent of artists, while conversely 68 percent of artists generated less than one euro in revenues. The remuneration situation is complicated by a lack of transparency. According to the study, revenues from music streaming are difficult to track and verify, partly due to complex contractual and licensing chains, calculation methods and a lack of data access. Furthermore, the remuneration situation is shaped by the market power of large streaming platforms and major labels. According to the results of the study, over 74 percent of those surveyed are dissatisfied with their income from music streaming. By contrast, fewer than 9 percent are satisfied.

The research network was funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media (BKM).

An English version of the report is planned.

Technologies have a normative dimension. That is by now a well-known insight from STS and neighbouring fields. Especially the ongoing and ubiquitous digitalization, however, raises ever new questions. Especially in terms of the legitimacy of technological normativity. Algorithms are being utilized in a diverse set of social institutions ranging from our media system to courts or the welfare state.

In a small workshop which took place on 14 January 2025, an interdisciplinary group of scholars at ENS discussed theoretical foundations of legitimacy and how to apply them on digital technologies. Specifically, they explored pragmatist approaches to bridging normative and empirical perspectives of legitimacy. The workshop thereby tried to navigate the long-going debate between normative theories, such as Rawls or Habermas, and anti-foundationalist and empirical oriented understandings of legitimacy. During the debate, the group also discussed the applicability and differences of such an understanding to the ongoing debate about Responsible and Ethical AI. Because, in the end, raising the issue of legitimacy does not only deal with the question whether a normative account in itself is acceptable, but also who has the power to define the rules of the game. This becomes especially important in the ongoing endeavors of big tech companies to define - and therefore also limit - accountable and responsible AI frameworks. The workshop was a first start to this debate at ENS and will be continued in future discussions.

 Participants: Prof. Dr. Miglė Bareikytė, Dr. Lukasz Duleba, Agnieszka Patecka, Dr. Nikolaus Poechhacker