Digital Media and Society Fellowship

Fellow 2024: Malte Ziewitz, Department of Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University

Malte Ziewitz is Associate Professor at the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. An ethnographer and sociologist, he studies the changing role of governance and regulation in, of, and through digitally networked environments. His recent work has looked at the lived experience of credit scoring subjects, the search engine optimization (SEO) industry, and attempts at algorithmic regulation. At Cornell, he also directs the Digital Due Process Clinic, a clinical research program that helps ordinary people cope with, understand, and challenge automated decision systems. He holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, an M.P.A. from Harvard University, and a First State Exam in Law from the University of Hamburg.

Fellow 2024: Manuel Menke, Institute of Communication, University of Copenhagen

Manuel Menke is Associate Professor at the Institute of Communication at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He studied journalism and political science in Bamberg and Mainz, completed his PhD at the University of Augsburg in 2017 and was a postdoc at the LMU in Munich until his move to Copenhagen in 2020. In his research, he focuses on memory and nostalgia in (digital) media, politics and society, the role of users in the emergence and spread of scandals, and emotions, hate and well-being in journalism. Menke is PI in the project "PastForward: The political uses of the past in digital discourses about Nordic futures (2023 - 2026)" and Co-PI in the project "EXPOSING: The Public Value of Socio-Mediated Scandals in the Digital Age (2024 - 2028)". He has been a founding member of the International Media and Nostalgia Network since 2015 and is currently also Chair and founding member of the ECREA Temporary Working Group Affect, Emotion & Media.

Fellow 2024: Benjamin Mako Hill, Department of Communication, University of Washington

Benjamin Mako Hill is a social scientist and technologist. In both roles, he works to understand the social dynamics that shape online communities. His work focuses on communities engaged in the peer production of digital public goods—like Wikipedia and Linux. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and a founding member of the Community Data Science Collective. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in UW's Department of Human-Centered Design & Engineering, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and Information School. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and an affiliate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science—both at Harvard University. He has also been an activist, developer, contributor, and leader in the free and open source software and free culture movements for more than two decades as part of the Debian, Ubuntu, and Wikimedia projects. He is the author of several best-selling technical books and has served terms as a member of the the Free Software Foundation board of directors and an advisor to the Wikimedia Foundation. Hill has a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab and a PhD from MIT in an interdepartmental program between the Sloan School of Management and the Media Lab.

Fellow 2023: Aljosha Karim Schapals, School of Communication der Queensland University of Technology (QUT)

Dr. Schapals is a Senior Lecturer and Departmental Coordinator of Journalism and Political Communication in the School of Communication at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Brisbane, Australia, and a Senior Researcher at the Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC).

He is also Book Reviews Editor at Media International Australia and Academic Supervisor at the Queensland Parliament.

He was previously a visiting lecturer in the Department of Journalism at City University of London. He also has experience as a practicing journalist and has worked for the Financial Times and the Federal Agency for Civic Education .

His research interests lie in the changing nature of news production and consumption through the internet, with a particular focus on social media, algorithms and automation in contemporary news production, and political communication more broadly.

Fellow 2023: Christine Lohmeier, Department of Communication Studies, University of Salzburg

Christine Lohmeier is a university professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Salzburg. She is the third visitor in the Digital Media and Society Fellowship program launched in 2022.

In Salzburg, Christine Lohmeier heads the Department of Media Use and Digital Cultures. Her research focuses on the intersections of media, identity, and processes of community. Current research projects focus on digital placemaking, media and memory, Web 3 developments and NFT communities.

Fellow 2022: Eedan Amit-Danhi, Department of Communication and Journalism, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

Eedan Amit-Danhi is a postdoctoral researcher at the PROFECI, ERC-funded project. Her doctorate, awarded in late 2021, traced the rhetorical functionalities, informational modalities, digital affordances, and political implications of digital political visualizations. With her dissertation-based publications appearing in New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society and IJOC. Eedan’s work is informed by her previous work in digital social change, user experience research and political marketing, striving to uncover the political and rhetorical strategies that foreground the visuals and visualizations we so often encounter on social media.

Combining PROFECI’s work on the social, political, and cultural dynamics around collective projections, with her own work on visuals and visualizations, Eedan’s work as Digital Communication and Society Fellow will center around the consolidation of several analytical perspectives into a holistic model for the analysis of predictive visualizations.

 

Fellow 2022: Anne Kaun, Department of Communication and Media Studies, Södertörn University, Sweden

Anne Kaun is professor in media and communication studies. Her research interests include media theory, mediated temporalities, algorithmic culture, automation and artificial intelligence from a humanistic social science perspective. In earlier projects, she has investigated media practices of protest movements such as the Occupy Wall Street movement, Occupy Stockholm and Occupy Latvia. She is particularly interested in how media technologies changed practices and tactics of the movements over time.

Besides her interest in political mobilization she has been engaging with the notion of media memories and their changing nature in the context of social media such as Facebook. Is the way we remember changing fundamentally since we are doing it online, in connection with others and in public? And what are commercial platforms offering and suppressing when it comes media memories?