• Topic: Platformization of Politics in Non-Democracies: Comparative Perspective on Claim-Making, Repressions, and Social Media Public in Belarus

Siarhei Liubimau's project studies the relations between repressions in authoritarian states and the usage of digital platforms, with the focus on the case of the Instagram usage in Belarus and in Venezuela. During the seminar, he will talk about the role of digital platforms in Belarus' unfinished revolution of 2020 and the digitalization of state repressions. He will further discuss how analysis of ‘big data’ helps us to understand the resulting social media public in Belarus in comparative perspective (with emphasis on Venezuela among other comparable cases).

• Topic: Inaugural Lectures (6 PM, on-site only)
• Location: European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder), Große Scharrnstraße 59, 15230 Frankfurt (Oder)
• Room: Senate Hall of the University, Main Building, Room 109 
• Agenda:
  • Welcome address by President Prof. Dr. Eduard Mühle
  • Introduction by the Dean of the Faculty of Cultural Sciences Prof. Dr. Timm Beichelt
  • Contribution by the Deputy Head of the European New School of Digital Studies Prof. Dr. Philipp Hacker
  • Inaugural Lecture Prof. Dr. Jan-Hendrik Passoth: Technological Politics: Infrastructures, Transformations, Publics (45 Min)
  • Inaugural Lecture Prof. Dr. Miglė Bareikytė: War Sensing: Datafication, Politics of Attention, Cooperation (45 Min)

After the presentations, we would like to round off the evening with drinks and snacks in a relaxed atmosphere. 

• Registration: Please This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. to register and facilitate our planning for this event.

• Topic: Values-sensitive design of information systems 

• Topic: Guided Discussion about a joint concept for evaluating courses in the Master of Digital Entrepreneurship (MoDE)

• Topic: tba

• Topic: Automated decisions on online platforms: the interplay between the GDPR, the DSA, and the AI Act

• Topic: ENS Fellows and Friends Paper Workshop

• Topic: Good Enoughness: Middle Tech companies and the culture of software work

Paula Bialski is an Associate Professor for Digital Sociology at the University of St. Gallen in St. Gallen, Switzerland. She is an ethnographer of digital technologies, looking at contexts of usage as well as production, and she frames her research within science and technology studies in particular.

Her new book “Middle Tech: software work and the culture of ‘good enough’ is an ethnography about how a collective group of people working at a run-of-the-mill corporate tech company collaborate, communicate, care, and compromise in order to make software work.

• Topic: Transnationalism and populist networks in a digital era: Canada and the Freedom Convoy

The growth and success of right-wing populist movements globally has been remarkable since the early 2010s. Indeed, populist parties in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and North America have received tremendous electoral success, shaping a movement for the people and by the people within the political sphere. To what extent do populist movements influence other such programs across national borders? Research has suggested that globalization has facilitated the spread of populist ideology. Referred to as transnational populism, authors suggest that emphasis on the ‘people’ as a ‘horizontal, membership-based collective with membership premised on an in/out logic between nations allows populist national movements to engage and share a global ideological program. This paper seeks to understand and measure to what extent populism has become a transnational movement and identify how populism moves across national borders through online political participation. To explore this question, we collected over 6,7 million digital trace data on X/Twitter during Canada's January- February 2022 Freedom Convoy movement. Receiving support from thousands of citizens, the Freedom Convoy revealed the ability of populist ideology to move aimlessly across international borders. We used a deep-learning model applied to text analysis (Fine-tuned BERT-base-Uncased) to implement a classification task to measure populist narratives during the movement.

• Topic: tba

• Topic: Still Trump’s Party: How Local Republican Leaders Made Up their Minds in the 2024 Presidential Nomination
  

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