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Axel Bruns

Mercator-Fellow

Axel Bruns was a guest in Bremen as a Mercator Fellow in spring 2026.

Prof. Axel Bruns is a researcher at the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, a key partner in the Australian Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S). He has long-standing ties to ZeMKI and ComAI through shared research networks and earlier collaborations, including Twitter and Society, the volume he co-edited with Cornelius Puschmann over a decade ago.

During his fellowship he explored both the opportunities and the risks of AI in communication, from new possibilities for analysing large datasets to hazards such as those surfaced by his recent study on how AI chatbots handle conspiracy theories. In his ComAI Lecture, “Reconsidering ‘the’ Public Sphere and its Algorithmic Formations,” he argued for moving beyond the notion of a single ‘public sphere’ and for more precisely capturing the many (often algorithmically curated) communicative formations of our platformised world.