About the lecture series
The lecture series “Cooperative Methodologies – Studying Sensory Media and AI” addresses methodological problems that emerge from studying media as an “ongoing accomplishment” (Garfinkel). The central premise is that methods cannot be treated as external instruments applied to pre-given objects. Rather, research situations are constituted through the entanglement of media and tools, technical and human sensing, and research practices. Methodological reflection thus focuses on the conditions under which knowledge is cooperatively produced and problematised.
A key challenge is the multiple situatedness of digital and sensor-based media. Practices are locally embedded yet generate and connect multiple situations through infrastructural distribution, real-time synchronization, and scalability. Micro-situations must therefore be analyzed in relation to infrastructures of sensing and sense-making, data publics and stakeholder constellations, and the interplay of human perception with technical sensor systems. This requires methodological designs that combine approaches capable of tracing cross-scale relations and controversies.
Furthermore, the lecture series is concerned with the methodological status of digital tools and AI systems within research practice. Tools for collecting, sharing, analysing, and visualising data inscribe their own ordering capacities into research. With sensor data and AI outputs, these effects intensify: classifications, recommendations, and model biases shape what can be observed, archived, and interpreted. The series situates these dynamics within debates on performativity, inscriptions, bias, and interface methods, while emphasizing that they emerge in entangled sensory research practices involving human and non-human agencies.
Finally, the lecture series inquires in how methodological choices distribute attention and agency: they determine which experiences count as data, which forms of sensing become legible, and which publics are addressed or excluded. Accordingly, the series approaches methods as political arrangements that govern participation in knowledge-making – asking whose voices enter datasets and models, whose interpretations shape analytic pipelines, and whose concerns remain unaccounted for. Cooperative methodology may require making conflicts over categories, metrics, and evidentiary standards explicit, accountable, and revisable.
Lectures
- #1 Ideal Subjects. The Abstract People of AI
Wed, 15.04.26 | 2-4 pm c.t.
Olga Goriunova - #2 The Ethics of AI-supported Research Methodologies
Wed, 29.04.26 | 2-4 pm c.t.
Simon Hirsbrunner - #3 Co-Designing Care & Technology: Methodological Insights from Community-Care Research
Wed, 13.05.26 | 2-4 pm c.t.
Dennis Kirschsieper & Claudia Müller - #4 Situated, Distributed, Messy: Meme Research in Synthetic Social Media
Wed, 27.05.26 | 2-4 pm c.t.
Elena Pilipets - #5 Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis and the Analysis of Technologized Interaction at Work with Functional Diversity & Mixed Abilities
Wed, 10.06.26 | 2-4 pm c.t.
Maija Hirvonnen - #6 Counter-Choreographies of Data: Activism Between Platform and Ground
Wed, 10.06.26 | 2-3.45 pm
Azadeh Ganjeh - #7 Machineries of Similarity and Difference: AIDS From Its Research Infrastructures
Wed, 10.06.26 | 4-5.30 pm
David Ribes - #8 Staying with the Trouble of Personal Data: Data Subject Rights as Method in Conditions of Limited Access
Wed, 08.07.26 | 2-4 pm c.t.
Yarden Skop & Maria Boole
