news & events

Technologies have a normative dimension. That is by now a well-known insight from STS and neighbouring fields. Especially the ongoing and ubiquitous digitalization, however, raises ever new questions. Especially in terms of the legitimacy of technological normativity. Algorithms are being utilized in a diverse set of social institutions ranging from our media system to courts or the welfare state.

In a small workshop which took place on 14 January 2025, an interdisciplinary group of scholars at ENS discussed theoretical foundations of legitimacy and how to apply them on digital technologies. Specifically, they explored pragmatist approaches to bridging normative and empirical perspectives of legitimacy. The workshop thereby tried to navigate the long-going debate between normative theories, such as Rawls or Habermas, and anti-foundationalist and empirical oriented understandings of legitimacy. During the debate, the group also discussed the applicability and differences of such an understanding to the ongoing debate about Responsible and Ethical AI. Because, in the end, raising the issue of legitimacy does not only deal with the question whether a normative account in itself is acceptable, but also who has the power to define the rules of the game. This becomes especially important in the ongoing endeavors of big tech companies to define - and therefore also limit - accountable and responsible AI frameworks. The workshop was a first start to this debate at ENS and will be continued in future discussions.

 Participants: Prof. Dr. Miglė Bareikytė, Dr. Lukasz Duleba, Agnieszka Patecka, Dr. Nikolaus Poechhacker

In an era where digitalisation rapidly influences every aspect of our lives, the benefits of technological transformation, including AI, are not equally distributed. Algorithmic discrimination and digital exclusion disproportionately affect already disadvantaged ethnic, national, and socioeconomic groups, widening the global digital divide. 

Typically, the discourse on inequalities related to AI emphasises bias in algorithms and data. Solutions often concentrate solely on improving algorithms or correcting data, overlooking the agency of individuals affected by rapid and exploitative introduction of AI solutions.  

Instead, we would like to develop the AI Literacy Leaders for Equality Program which will empower individuals from Global Majority and other underrepresented backgrounds to influence digital competencies within their communities. The workshop aims at laying groundwork for the development of a flexible AI literacy curriculum that could be adapted by trained AI Literacy Leaders to reflect the local needs. 

The workshop is open to all interested in collaborating on the idea of developing the AI Literacy Leaders for Equality Program. In particular, we are interested in highly motivated individuals from Global Majority nationalities and ethnicities, as well as those coming from socio-economically underprivileged and underrepresented backgrounds.  

The number of in-person participants is limited. Lunch and refreshments during coffee breaks and reception will be provided. We might be able to offer accommodation for the night of 8 and/or 9 December. Please indicate that in the form. In individual cases, we might be also able to cover reasonable travel expenses - please email us if you need such support. 

The workshop will be held in hybrid mode, with in-person participation at the ENS Coworking Space located at the first floor of Collegium Polonicum library building in Słubice, Poland, 1 hour from Berlin by train. Online participants will receive a link to the meeting in advance of the event.

Around 150 international researchers will be discussing the interplay between technology and transformation at the 11th “Tensions of Europe” conference at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt (Oder) from September 19 to 21, 2024. The aim of the conference is to shed light on the technological, but also the political, social and ecological aspects of comprehensive change in Europe and other regions.

The conference will open on Thursday, September 19, 5 p.m., in the Great Hall of the Collegium Polonicum in Słubice with welcoming remarks by Viadrina President Prof. Dr. Eduard Mühle, and an English-language panel discussion on “Co-Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe in Past and Present”. Participants:

• Miglė Bareikytė, Professor of Digital Studies at ENS
• Dagmara Jajeśniak-Quast, Professor of Interdisciplinary Polish Studies, European University Viadrina
• Dr. Valeria Korablyova, sociologist at the Charles University in Prague
• Dr. Susann Worschech, political sociologist, European University Viadrina

The discussion will be moderated by ENS Director and Professor for Sociology of Technology, Jan-Hendrik Passoth.

The “Tensions of Europe” conference is organized every two years by the international research network of the same name. The network focuses on international research, teaching and transfer activities on technology and European history. In the run-up to the conference, around 20 young researchers from many European countries come together for a three-day summer school.
The summer school and conference are being held at the Viadrina for the first time this year. The organizers are the Viadrina Center of Polish and Ukrainian Studies (VCPU) and the ENS.

ENS Professor for Digital Studies Migle Bareikye is one of the organizers of the Summer School "Platformization,
Digital Disinformation & Non-Democratic Politics - Belarus in Comparative Perspective" to take place from 16-27 July 2024 at the European Humanities University in Vilnius, Lithuania. The Summer School will explore both the consequences of digital platforms’ omnipresence in non-democracies, with a special focus on Belarus, as well as the anti-democratic aspects of digital developments in democracies, such as digital disinformation. It  emphasises the critical entanglement of both the emancipatory politicisation and deliberative democratic practices, and the unprecedented repressions in Belarus today with the reality of digital platforms. It also exploits the tension between the logics of infrastructures as stable and usually state owned and those of digital platforms as constantly re-programmable and privately owned and the ways this opposition develops and stands out in post-Soviet authoritarianism and in comparable cases. 

The program features multiple contributions by Professor Migle Bareikyte as well as ENS PhD Researcher Johanna Hiebl. The full program is available online or for download below.

On 25 June 2024, 4:15 PM, we are happy to host ENS Research Fellow Jean-Christophe Boucher (University of Calgary, Canada) as a guest speaker in our Research Seminar. Everyone is welcome to join either on-site in the ENS Coworking Space or online via Zoom (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.).

Abstract:

The growth and success of right-wing populist movements globally has been remarkable since the early 2010s. Indeed, populist parties in Europe, Asia, Latin America, and North America have received tremendous electoral success, shaping a movement for the people and by the people within the political sphere. To what extent do populist movements influence other such programs across national borders? Research has suggested that globalization has facilitated the spread of populist ideology. Referred to as transnational populism, authors suggest that emphasis on the ‘people’ as a ‘horizontal, membership-based collective with membership premised on an in/out logic between nations allows populist national movements to engage and share a global ideological program. This paper seeks to understand and measure to what extent populism has become a transnational movement and identify how populism moves across national borders through online political participation. To explore this question, we collected over 6,7 million digital trace data on X/Twitter during Canada's January- February 2022 Freedom Convoy movement. Receiving support from thousands of citizens, the Freedom Convoy revealed the ability of populist ideology to move aimlessly across international borders. We used a deep-learning model applied to text analysis (Fine-tuned BERT-base-Uncased) to implement a classification task to measure populist narratives during the movement.

On 4 June 2024, we were happy to host the first ever ENS Fellows and Friends Paper Workshop at the ENS Coworking Space. It featured an interdisciplinary lineup of top international scholars presenting their latest research on AI and data processing. Each 60-minute paper session included a 5-10 minutes input by the author, followed by a 10-minute commentary, and concluded with a discussion and Q&A session. We were very happy to welcome notable speakers from Georgetown, LSE, and Oxford, such as danah boyd, Orla Lynskey, Jeremias Adams-Prassl, Nora Ni Loideain, Philipp Hacker, and Joanna Bryson.

The morning sessions featured danah boyd, followed by Orla Lynskey discussing "The Regulation of Inferences." The afternoon included presentations by Jeremias Adams-Prassl on his latest Book Proposal on “Technology Law," Philipp Hacker on "Generative Discrimination," and Nora Ni Loideain on "AI and Facial Recognition Regulation – Divergences in EU and UK Law." The workshop concluded with Joanna Bryson's presentation on “An AI Cold War” and a networking session with drinks on the CP rooftop terrace.

Thank you all for coming and being our guests - your feedback was very encouraging to establish this format and we can't wait to see you again!