News

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 (…)

A new working paper by Göran Bolin entitled “On the concept of communication in the face of artificial conversational agents” was recently published. What is it about? There are, as of course well known in the philosophy of communication, several conceptualisations of the phenomenon of communication throughout media and communications research. Examples include the intersubjective (…)

Few technological developments spark more debate today than artificial intelligence. From promises of human advancement to fears of existential risk, AI generates a multitude of visions, conflicts, and societal debates. This “imaginative landscape of AI” goes beyond technical issues, encompassing political struggles, social movements, and ideas about the future of communication and society. The International (…)

As part of project P1 on pioneer communities within the “Communicative AI” research unit, interviews are currently being conducted to capture the ‘imaginative landscape of AI’ in the San Francisco Bay Area (Silicon Valley) and the greater Berlin area. By ‘imaginative landscape of AI,’ we mean the entirety of visions, positions, and conflicts seen in relation (…)

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 (…)

At the University of Bremen, the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) is seeking to fill, starting at the earliest on 01st January 2026, a position as Research Associate (f/m/d). Pay group 13 TV-L, full-time (39.2 hours per week), limited to 36 months (in accordance with § 2 WissZeitVG) for the development of (…)