Digital Media and Society Fellowship

Lital Henig, Kreitman School of Advanced Graduate Studies, Ben Gurion University of the Negev

Lital Henig is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Kreitman School of Advanced Graduate Studies at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. She recently submitted her PhD in the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where in her dissertation, "Retracing Memory: Holocaust Memory in Digital Culture," she explored the status of material traces of the past in Holocaust memory in digital culture. During her doctoral studies, she has also served as a research fellow at the Avraham Harman Institute of Contemporary Jewry and as a member of the Horizon 2020 research project: "Visual History of the Holocaust: Rethinking Curation in the Digital Age." Lital was also awarded the President of Israel Scholarship for Excellence and Innovation in Science. Her research interests include visual media, memory studies, digital culture, film studies, and Jewish culture, with a particular focus on visual media, remediation, and memory. She has published several articles on these topics. 
 

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.

Aljosha Karim Schapals, School of Communication, 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 practising 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.

 

Christine Lohmeier, Department of Communication Studies, University of Salzburg
Christine Lohmeier is a university professor in the Department of Communication Science at the University of Salzburg. She is the third recipient of the ‘Digital Media and Society’ fellowship programme, which starts 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 community processes. Current research projects focus on digital placemaking, media and memory, Web 3 developments and NFT communities.

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

Eedan Amit-Danhi is a postdoctoral researcher at PROFECI, an ERC-funded project. In her doctoral thesis, completed at the end of 2021, she investigated the rhetorical functions, information modalities, digital possibilities and political implications of digital political visualisations. Her publications based on the dissertation appeared in New Media & Society, Information, Communication & Society and IJOC. Eedan's work builds on her previous work in digital social change, user experience research and political marketing, and aims to uncover the political and rhetorical strategies that prioritise the visual representations and visualisations we so often encounter on social media.

Combining PROFECI's work on the social, political and cultural dynamics related to collective projections with her own work on visuals and visualisations, Eedan's work as a Digital Communication and Society Fellow will focus on consolidating different analytical perspectives into a holistic model for the analysis of predictive visualisations.

 

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

Anne Kaun is Professor of Media and Communication Studies. Her research interests include media theory, mediated temporality, algorithmic culture, automation and artificial intelligence from a humanistic social science perspective. In previous projects, she has analysed the media practices of protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Stockholm and Occupy Latvia. She is particularly interested in how media technologies have changed the practices and tactics of movements over time.

In addition to her interest in political mobilisation, she is concerned with the notion of media memory and how it changes in the context of social media such as Facebook. Is the way we remember fundamentally changing as we do so online, in connection with others and in public? And what do commercial platforms offer and suppress when it comes to media memories?