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Axel Bruns as Mercator Fellow with ComAI in Bremen

From 21 March to 12 June 2026, Prof. Axel Bruns (Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane) will join the research group Communicative AI (ComAI) at the University of Bremen as a Mercator Fellow.

During his stay, he will contribute to cross-project discussions of our collaborative research, with a particular focus on the current theme of triangulations of ComAI research methods. He will also (co-)author a chapter for the Living Handbook and has the opportunity to undertake short stays at other research unit sites.

About the person:

Axel Bruns is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, as well as a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His books include Are Filter Bubbles Real? (2019) and Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (2018), alongside numerous edited collections such as Digitizing Democracy (2019), The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), and Twitter and Society (2014).

His research focusses on user participation in social media and its implications for our understanding of the contemporary public sphere, drawing especially on innovative methods for analysing “big social data.” From 2017 to 2019, he served as President of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). Further information can be found on his research blog snurb.info and via Bluesky at @snurb.info.