News

On November 10, 2025, the research group Communicative AI (ComAI) held its quarterly meeting at the Haus der Wissenschaft in Bremen. The focus was on an exchange with Prof. Dr. Andrea L. Guzman (Northern Illinois University), currently a visiting scholar at ZeMKI, as well as on planning the group’s joint publications for the coming year. (…)

Date: 25.11.2025 Time: 18:30 Street: Schnoor 27 Location: Bremer Presse-Club Abstract AI promises speed, efficiency, and seamless automation, yet in pursuing these ideals, we risk marginalizing practices and temporalities that matter: slowness, reflection, imperfection, and the capacity to linger. This talk reframes the conversation about AI futures by focusing not only on what is to come, but on what (…)

An article by Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp entitled “Approaching digital futures: why media and communication research needs to move from a perspective of consequence to one of emergence” was recently published in the International Communication Association journal “Communication Theory”. In the article, Andreas Hepp makes it clear that communication and media studies should focus more (…)

On November 4, 2025, Prof. Dr. Andrea L. Guzman (Northern Illinois University), visiting scholar at the ZeMKI, held a lecture at the Bremer Presse-Club as part of the ComAI Lectures series. In her talk, “Collective consequences of AI across media industries,” she traced the evolution of research in Human-Machine Communication (HMC) and discussed the challenges (…)

Date: 4. November 2025 Time: 18:30 Street: Schnoor 27 Location: Bremer Presse-Club Abstract This talk examines the shared implications of emerging AI technologies across media industries. Advancements in generative artificial intelligence are bringing rapid changes to communication industries. AI applications can perform increasingly human-like roles in the communication process and, as such, can augment and even automate human media (…)

A new article by Noortje Marres, Christian Katzenbach, Anders Kristian Munk, and Anna Jobin has been published in Big Data & Society. Serving as the introduction to the Special Issue “Analysing Artificial Intelligence Controversies?”, the paper explores how public controversies around artificial intelligence shape — and are shaped by — broader social tensions. The authors (…)

How do visions of the future emerge within science, media, and society – and what methodological approaches help us study them? Under the title “From Analyses of the Present to Futuring”, the DFG Research Unit Communicative AI (ComAI) together with the Section for Sociology of Knowledge of the German Sociological Association (DGS) invites submissions for (…)

On September 30, Prof. Dr. Nathan Schneider (University of Boulder, Colorado, USA) and Dr. Johannes Bennke (Bar-Ilan University, Israel) visited ZeMKI for the ComAI lecture Protocols and Intellectual Landscapes. Together with ComAI spokesperson and ZeMKI member Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp the workshop discussed the concepts of protocological governance and intellectual landscapes of AI in a joint, theoretical investigation. Protocols (…)

The ComAI subproject “Personal sphere: Companionship and ComAI” (P7) presents its initial findings at this year’s congress of the German Sociological Association at the University of Duisburg-Essen (September 22–26, 2025). In the Adhoc group “Actors without Humans – Conceptualization and Consequences of Non-Human Agency,” Marvin Waibel, Andrea Heisse, and Michaela Pfadenhauer introduce a conceptualization of the agency of communicative (…)

From 17 to 19 September 2025, the annual ComAI Summer School took place in Graz, following the research group’s retreat. The event began with poster presentations in which all doctoral researchers pitched the current state of their dissertation projects in short talks. Afterwards, they received focused feedback from PIs of other subprojects during an open (…)

From 15 to 17 September 2025, our Research Unit met for its first multi-day annual research retreat, followed by the doctoral researchers’ summer school. The meeting took place at the project site in Graz, Austria. The focus this time was on methodological questions: How can concepts such as alignment or appropriation be made comparable across (…)

The article by ZeMKI member Prof. Dr. Andreas Hepp entitled Curators of digital futures: The life cycle of pioneer communities, which appeared online in New Media & Society in 2024, is now also available in print. What is the article about? Research typically considers corporate actors such as large tech companies or government agencies as drivers of deep (…)