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Research

Research areas

Digital Gaming Research

The research focus “Digital Gaming” suggests a holistic perspective that switches from the analysis of games to a broader notion and understanding of gaming in a deeply mediatized society.

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Research Unit "Communicative AI"

When chatbots answer questions, voice assistants organise appointments, or AI tools summarise texts, this doesn’t just affect individual users—it also shapes how we communicate as a society. The DFG and FWF funded Research Unit “Communicative AI” (ComAI) explores what happens when AI systems increasingly take (…)

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Projects

  • Active

Fostering Digital Pan-Africanism in AI Governance through Evidence and Action (AI PAN-AFRICANISM)
“Fostering Digital Pan-Africanism in AI Governance through Evidence and Action” (AI PAN-AFRICANISM) is a four-year, transdisciplinary research project that aims to rethink the governance of artificial intelligence (AI) in Africa. While AI increasingly influences areas such as access to information, health, and digital public services, global rules are mostly determined by the U.S., the EU, and China. African countries often have little influence in this regard.
  • 2026 – 2030
  • Dr. Dennis Redeker

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PhD projects

„The communicative construction of Public AI: a media-ethnographic study.“
The discourse on the future of AI is currently dominated by commercial systems, profitable use cases, and promises of economic growth driven by Big Tech. Various actors from the non-profit sector and beyond regard this dominance of commercial AI as a threat to the social fabric: systems such as ChatGPT or Grok are criticized for their at times problematic response behavior, while companies like OpenAI, xAI, and Palantir are accused of collaborating with authoritarian regimes and subverting democratic institutions.

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The Language-Developing Design of Escape Rooms as a Method for Promoting Subject-Specific Competence in Religious Education: A Qualitative Study Focusing on Students Who Have Migrated from Ukraine
Given the growing religious, cultural, and linguistic diversity in learning groups—which presents the challenge of addressing learners’ varying backgrounds and needs in the classroom—the search for innovative teaching approaches in religious education is becoming increasingly important. Numerous studies show that the use of escape rooms in an educational context can increase learners’ motivation to learn and perform. However, the specific language-building design of such formats in religious education has hardly been researched to date.

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The Roman Catholic Church in Germany as a Political Actor – A Sociological Analysis of Discourse on Positioning and Exclusion Processes
This dissertation project uses sociological discourse analysis to examine how the RKK draws organizational boundaries, communicates these both internally and externally, and what consequences this has for the institution’s relationship with its members. The focus is on the public communicative positioning of actors within the RKK who operate at various organizational levels.

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Cross-sectional topics

Digital Methods in Context

Digital and networked media permeate almost all areas of life. The analysis of digital traces – i.e. social media postings, audiovisual content, but also app and web tracking data – has enormous potential for understanding social phenomena. The same applies to the use of research software to survey media and data practices. However, both also (…)

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Infrastructures

Various projects of the ZeMKI Labs pursue an improvement of digital infrastructures for research, teaching and science transfer beyond their respective research goals. The spectrum of approaches is conceivably broad and integrative: From information infrastructures to specific databases, apps and platforms, these efforts are designed to last and to make specific data, software, publication options (…)

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Sustainability and the good life

The current transformation of media and communication is also a challenge for sustainability and the good life. This is not only about ecological issues, for example, in the sense that the energy requirements and environmental impacts of the infrastructures of digital media are immense. At the same time, however, it is a question of how (…)

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10 labs. One research community.

Lab Audio-Visual Media and Historiography
This Lab investigates audio-visual media – particularly film and television – as historical sources and documents of the history of modernity. Central to this is the role of these media for memory and the construction (…)

0 active project

Lab Datafication and Mediatization
The Datafication and Mediatization Lab deals with how societies change when they are increasingly saturated by digital media and their infrastructures. The lab focuses on the role digital data play in these globalized processes of (…)

6 active project

Lab Digital Communication and Information Diversity
Our digital information environment is complex: diverse, but also characterized by a lack of transparency, fake news and algorithms. The “Digital Communication and Information Diversity” (DCID) lab systematically examines how we use digital media and (…)

2 active project

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Latest publications

ZeMKI Policy Paper No. 1: "Resilient Journalism After Platformization"
This policy paper examines how precarious working conditions, platform dependency, the AI transformation and funding gaps are putting pressure on journalism in Germany, and sets out recommendations for strengthening the resilience of journalism by improving working conditions, developing editorial AI skills, promoting public-interest funding and fostering local communication ecosystems.
10.06.2026

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