Many of our activities take place in the RUSTlab. For information please see: https://rustlab.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/
23rd-24th November 2026, Vienna
Fabian Pittroff is going to contribute to the workshop "Data Matters: Residual Ecologies of Digital Innovationism" in Vienna with his presentation titled "Making Meaning Matter: Residual Imaginaries in Humanities Research Infrastructures". Based on a multi-year praxiography, Fabian is going to explore how research data are materially enacted in the data-skeptical field of the humanities – in notes, excerpts, bibliographies, or hand-curated spreadsheets that their makers rarely call data. Fabian is going to trace how these infrastructural residues take part in producing epistemic residues, such as the imaginaries of VR art, lidar sensors, or the digital life of a nineteenth-century library. Ultimately, Fabian is going to read the humanities' data skepticism not as a deficit to be managed away, but as a resource akin to digital sobriety: a residual imaginary from which more careful paths of infrastructure innovation can be activated.
More information can be found here.
9th-11th November 2026, German Mining Museum Bochum
Fabian Pittroff is going to contribute to the Culture Community Plenary (CCP) in Bochum with a Pecha Kucha talk titled "Das soziale Leben der Daten" (The Social Life of Data). Drawing on ethnographic research, Fabian will tell in 20 images what happens at desks and in meeting rooms when ideas become data and data turn into ideas: from hegemonic word processing to highly personal systems for ordering notes, literature, and materials. Fabian is going to argue that the actual lives of research data are less linear and tidy than the research data lifecycle suggests, and that virtual research environments are not neutral infrastructures but shape epistemologies and styles of thought.
More information can be found here.
2nd November 2026, 15:00-18:00, German Mining Museum Bochum
As a Principal Investigator in the second Phase of The Leibniz ScienceCampus ReForm and as a Management Board member of Estrid Sørensen contributes to an exciting network about the involvement of geo-resources in shaping historical and contemporary cultures and social formations. On 2nd November we kick-off the second phase of ReForm with among others a keynote of Prof. Theodore Schatzki.
More information can be found here.
Winter Term 26/27, MB 4/165 at Ruhr-University Bochum and on Zoom
The programme for the 16th round of the RUSTlab Lecture series is now available. The lectures will take place on site in MB 4/165 (Exception: The lecture on 19.11.2026 will take place in GB 03/49) and online via Zoom. This semester's guiding theme is "Sacrificial Intelligence" and speakers include Mitch Pfeifer (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Bee and Gerko Egert (Ruhr University Bochum), Alberto Quintavalla (Rotterdam), and Sigrid Kannengiesser (University of Münster). Everyone is most welcome!
Please find more information here.
15th October 2026, 17:15-18:45, Göttinger Digitale Akademie in Göttingen
Along with Anne Baillot (dariah), Julian Kunkel (gwdg) and Jörg Wettlaufer (NAWG), Estrid Sørensen is joining the panel-discussion titled Nachhaltigkeit und KI – Technik, Ethik, Praxis at the “Nachhaltigkeit und generative KI” (“Sustainability and generative AI”) conference taking place from 15-16th October 2026 in Göttingen and online. The main topics of the conference are the challenges and opportunities associated with the sustainability aspects of artificial intelligence as well as the prospects of developing an idea of AI-assisted, virtual and most importantly green data centres. The panel’s primary discussion focus is to determine the relations of sustainability and AI as well as their possible implementation into reality.
More information can be found here.
8th October 2026, 13:30-15:20, 4S 2026 in Toronto
Between 7-10 October, the 50th Anniversary for the Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) is going to take place in Toronto. The conference theme is Techno Power • Technoscientific Futures.
As a participant in the panel From Bubbles to Rubbles: Ruins in the Age of AI, Estrid Sørensen is going to present her paper on university data centres, which are at the intersection of planetary burdens and knowledge production, and thus are a key object of study in learning how to operate knowledge machines with the non-extractivistic resources at hand. Their dilemma of demands for more computing energy and the need to save energy is interpreted as a characteristic situation for progress-oriented modern science when standing before ruins. The paper argues that the key challenge to make computing-dependent science response-able to the planet lies in co-enacting scientific knowledge and planetarity.
In addition to participating in the panel, Estrid Sørensen is going to be a discussant in Hannah Rogers’s New Book Panels: Art–Science and Technology Studies, which states that art and science are not as different as often assumed, and therefore asks "What can art and STS do together?“.
More information can be found here.
6th October 2026
Estrid Sørensen has contributed a post titled “Smooth Operating: Computing Infrastructures between Scientific Knowledge Production and its Planetarity” to the Käte Hamburger Kolleg: Cultures of Research (c:o/re) blog, in which she talks about her experience with visiting university data centres across Germany and about the rituals associated with them. Additionally, she comments on the DIN EN50600 norm, which sets a boundary to “customers”, including scientists, by not allowing them entry to data centres, and thus restricting them in knowledge about how data processing affects the planet. In the blog post, Estrid Sørensen also reports on the talks she conducted with several data centre employees, which address the concerns about the energy consumption of their facilities’, which is a key aspect of scientific knowledge productions planetarity, in which she identifies different strategies mentioned by the interviewees on how to solve this problem.
More information can be found here.
5th October 2026, 19:30-21:00, Trent University in Peterborough, Canada
Trent University’s Cultural Studies doctorate program is sponsoring an annual speakers' series providing an opportunity for their students to hear and meet some of the scholars in the humanities and social sciences, this time inviting Estrid Sørensen to give a seminar on Data Centres in Rheinland and Their Relational Agency as Traps. She is going to talk about four hyperscaler data centres, which are planned for the Rhenish Mining Area in Germany, by envisioning them as traps and telling their stories, which reveal the relations of industry and state in developing these data centres as well as how hyperscalers are entangled with energy infrastructures. During Estrid Sørensen’s speech, she will also raise questions about vulnerabilities of hyperscalers, and about who is trapping whom in infrastructure arrangements.
More information can be found here.
2nd October 2026, 9:00-11:45, Mainz
Olga Galanova is going to contribute to the DGS-Congress in Mainz as part of the AdhocGroup "Zu den Quellen – aber wie? Methoden der Historischen Soziologie" with her presentation titled "Zukunft aus der Vergangenheit durchschauen? Zeitperspektiven in Akten zu Rechenzentren". She is going to explore whether and how the history of data centers can be understood by reconstructing the horizons of expectation within which technical infrastructures were once planned, built, operated, and eventually decommissioned. She is going to talk about the multidimensional analysis of historical documentation of data centers, focusing on their content, organizational structures and hierarchies and physical properties, such as handwritten notes or missing attachments.
More information can be found here.
1st October 2026, Hamburg
Fabian Pittroff is co-organizing the panel of the AG Interfaces at this year's annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (GfM), together with Jens Fehrenbacher (TH Köln) and Timo Kaerlein (Ruhr-University Bochum). Taking up the conference theme of "solidity", the panel titled "Was hält? Interface Studies zwischen Konsolidierung und Transformation" is going to take stock of media studies' research on interfaces: Which topics and approaches currently shape the field, and how do developments such as AI agents as an HCI paradigm, ambient interfaces, the virtualization of interaction orders, or new dispositifs of interface work challenge established theories and methods? Instead of classic talks, the panel is going to work in an open workshop format: four short inputs – on defaults in programming and data, on VR art displacing the screen, on vibration interfaces, and on AI agents as a new interface paradigm – will be followed by small-group discussions of concrete material.
More information can be found here.
1st October 2026
We warmly welcome the newest member of our team Aljoscha Böhm! He is starting his PhD in the CRC 1567 Virtual Lifeworlds with a strong academic background, having finished a bachelor’s degree in Sociology, Politics & Economics at the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen, as well as a master’s degree in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Not only did he study at one of the most acclaimed universities in the United Kingdom, but he also did an exchange semester at the University of California. During his PhD he is going to focus on a data center at the Ruhr University Bochum from the 1960s to early 1990s. We are extremely excited about getting to work with him!
1st October 2026, 12:30-14:00, Syracuse University, New York
What does it take for a university to be response-able to the planet? Estrid Sørensen’s ethnographic fieldwork around a scientific data centre shows that the answer is rarely a matter of awareness or good intentions. In fact, a lot of challenges became visible through the ethnographic work that seeks to understand scientific knowledge as planetary, thus as extended relations in and through one shared world. As a guest speaker at Syracuse University in New York, Estrid Sørensen is going to talk about these challenges, as well as the concept of “planetary scientific knowledge”.
More information, including the Zoom link, can be found here.
October 2026
A Handbook of Digital Social Science was published in October, which included a chapter from Ryoko Asai titled Digital Parenting with a Social Robot: How Can Emerging Technologies Contribute to Enhance the Quality of Family Life and Mitigate Ethical Risks in Child Development?. The book offers a new vision of historical foundations, emergent formations as well as future possibilities in an evolving field of digital social science. Key topics covered in this book include issues of governance, policy experiences, child development, and digital inequality and oppression. Ryoko Asai’s chapter contributes to the exploration of the potential benefits and ethical challenges of using social robots in parenting, particularly in relation to family life, parent-child relationships, and children's development.
More information can be found here.
30th September 2026
An essay by Mace Ojala titled Maintain-ability: On Life Alongside Computer Software was published in a special issue of the Tecnoscienza – Italian Journal of Science & Technology Studies. The paper addresses the challenges of our co-existence with technology by presenting an empirical study based on interviews conducted with software maintainers, as well as on the notions documented in the Science and Technology Studies’ literature. Mace Ojala suggests a concept of maintain-ability, which describes the programmers’ ability to give and receive care, as well as raises a question of what is necessary for the bodies of software to be able to receive care in the third millennium.
The paper can be found here.
29th October 2026, 14:15-17:00, DGS-Congress 2026 in Mainz, Germany
Zukünfte der Gesellschaft is the theme of the 43rd Congress of the German Sociological Association (DGS), taking place between 28.09. and 02.10. in Mainz. Stefan Laser is going to participate in the Ad-hoc Group Digitale Infrastrukturen und der Kampf um gesellschaftliche Zukünfte, which discusses contested digital infrastructures as struggles over the social and material foundations of society’s future. In this context, he is going to present a paper on the planetarity of data centres. This draws on research in the CRC Virtual Lifeworlds, and new studies on the chip industry.
More information can be found here.
28th September 2026, 15:30-17:00, Cornell University
Estrid Sørensen is going to present at the STS Colloquium taking place at Cornell University with her research on Planetary scientific knowledge and the reality of the contemporary university. The idea of “planetary scientific knowledge”, based on Science & Technology Studies conceptualizes scientific knowledge as inherently planetary, and Estrid Sørensen argues that implementing this approach in modern scientific and university settings is difficult. Based on this premise, she is going to focus on ethnographic studies regarding scientific, data center, and energy management practices at a German university, as well as on various struggles that occur during the realization of planetary scientific knowledge.
More information can be found here.
15th September 2026
Besides being the editorial team of Across the Layers of Planetary Matter, Data Infrastructures, and Knowledge Production, Estrid Sørensen, Leman Çelik and Stefan Laser have also contributed an article to the special issue, which addresses their already established interest in planetarity. While the traditional view on scientific knowledge within the Science and Technology Studies is that of socio-material character, Estrid Sørensen, Leman Çelik and Stefan Laser are proposing an approach on conceptualising scientific knowledge as extended relations in and through one shared world, or, as the title suggests, planetary. This article therefore emphasizes the necessity of a shift from social to planetary studies of scientific knowledge, motivated by concern over science’s lack of engagement with its role in shaping the planet.
The special issue can be found here.
15th September 2026
Knowledge has planetary weight. It accumulates in infrastructures, flows through cables, and settles in data centres that consume land, water, minerals, and energy on a planetary scale. Yet this weight is rarely felt in the everyday practices through which knowledge is produced, circulated, contested, and consumed. This special issue edited by Leman Çelik, Stefan Laser and Estrid Sørensen offers empirical studies of the interrelations between knowledge, planetary matter, and data infrastructures alongside conceptual discussions of how to think across these layers. The special issue holds an editorial and a theoretical contribution by the authors and furthermore articles by Martin Tremčinský, James Maguire, Anne Pasek, Brian Sutherland, Mads Dahl Gjefsen, Synne Svinsås Gjønnes, Benjamin Sovacool, Can Hankendi, Ayşe Coşkun and Anna-Laila Danielsen, as well as book reviews by Brett Mommersteeg, Nona Schulte-Römer and Aube Richebourg.
The special issue can be found here.
15th September 2026
We warmly welcome Eugene as a new member of our team. He is currently studying social science and mathematics with a particular interest in statistical methods and migration research. We are looking forward to working with him and to the new perspectives he brings through his interdisciplinary background.
10th September 2026, 13:00-13:30, EASST2026 Kraków
As part of the EASST2026 conference, which is taking place from 7-11 September in Kraków, there is going to be a book launch for the book Predictions: From Speculative Ethnography to Apocalyptic Testimony. Published in June 2026, this is the first of three volumes. Stefan Laser, Mél Hogan and Edward Ongweso Jr., along with guest editor Hollis A. Brown, edited the book, which makes a case for engaging with practices and cultures of predictions. One chapter of a speculative fabulation was contributed by Estrid Sørensen. At the launch, it is possible to talk about the book with some of them over a glass of prosecco or orange juice.
More information ca be found here.
9th September 2026, 9:00-10:30, EASST2026 Kraków
Estrid Sørensen and Olga Galanova are going to take part in the biennial international EASST conference, this year held in Kraków, Poland, in which they are going to organize a panel titled Data infrastructure worldlings: Epistemic and planetary co-enactments. Although not new, the topics of planetary effects of datacenters and epistemic effects of AI are going to be reimagined with an idea of considering both to be connected. The resulting questions regarding worldlings constituted through both planetarity and knowing are going to be discussed through speculative reflections, rather than thinking of them as linear progressions from past to future.
More information about the panel can be found here.
9th September 2026, 9:00-10:30, EASST2026 Kraków
Stefan Laser and Susann Wagenknecht (TU Dresden) are going to organise a panel on Silicon lives: Infrastructures and ecologies of semiconductor industries at the EASST 2026 conference, taking place from 7–11 September. The theme of this year‘s conference is More than now: exploring resilient futures, inspired by the notion of the more-than-human. Against this backdrop, Stefan Laser and Susann Wagenknecht ask about the future of semiconductor industries. What futures can be imagined to change of infrastructures and ecologies of high-tech chip worlds? What makes silicon lives viable and resilient?
More information about the panel can be found here.
1st September 2026
Nicole Zaunith has joined the CRC 1567 Virtual Lifeworlds as a PhD student with a main research focus on a Stasi data center in Wuhlheide, Berlin from the 1960s to early 1990s. Her academic milestones include a bachelor’s degree in Museology and History at the University of Würzburg and a master’s degree in Empirical Culture Science and European ethnology at the LMU Munich. Furthermore, she brings experience as a scientific trainee at the Technoseum in Mannheim. We warmly welcome her to the team and are looking forward to our cooperation!
31st August 2026, 12:00-13:30, Cologne Game Lab at TH Köln
As part of the STRATEGIES Summer School: Planetary Futures of the Cologne Game Lab, Estrid Sørensen is going to give the opening keynote on Planetary futures, planetary knowledges, planetary hopes. The Summer School‘s aim is to translate evidence of environmental topics into action and to find solutions for planetary futures. The two main areas of focus are ecological games and responsible development. In Estrid Sørensen‘s opening keynote, she is going to talk about the notion of the planetary in the social sciences and humanities, which encourages a perspetive in modern culture to think differently, shape different beings, ontologies, care and knowledge. This shift challenges us to imagining futures as planetary and design futures that are planetary.
More information can be found here.
30th June 2026, 15:15-17:00, Aalborg University, Copenhagen
Fabian Pittroff is going to present the paper "Infrastructuring Contingency: Praxiography of Humanities Research Data Infrastructures" at the DASTS conference in Copenhagen on 30 June 2026, in the panel "The Interpretive Layer: Expertise as Infrastructure in Sociotechnical Systems". Drawing on multi-year fieldwork at a humanities research center, the paper addresses the mismatch between the research data infrastructures now consolidating in Germany and open-ended, interpretive humanities research. While data policies ask for systematic and stable data use, the fieldwork documents many everyday, often personal data practices. Fabian Pittroff proposes a broader understanding of data and reported on an attempt to realign an infrastructural ecology by embracing contingency.
More information can be found here.
June 2026
Estrid Sørensen has participated in a chapter of the book Infrastructures of (Non-)Knowledge: Virtuality and Epistemic Transformations. Together with Patrizia Breil, Anne Dippel, Christoph Engemann and Iris van der Tuin - the panelists from the panel Virtual University at the annual conference Infrastructures of (Non-)Knowledge of the CRC 1567 Virtual Lifeworlds on 10 October 2024 – they co-authored the chapter about The Virtual University, in which they discuss the post-Covid shift towards the virtual university. Some questions they speculate answers about are: How do sciences work (together) in the virtual university of the future? How are its infrastructures and its architectures designed? How do we study, research and administer at and through virtual universities? And what does the virtual university make humans feel like?
The book can be found here.
June 2026
Sandra Abels, Mace Ojala and Estrid Sørensen, along with Jens Fehrenbacher, have contributed a chapter to the new book in the Virtual Lifeworlds book series Infrastructures of (Non-)Knowledge: Virtuality and Epistemic Transformations. In their text, How to Know a Data Centre without Leaving your Cosmology at the Door? An Augmented Reality Field Study, they ask: How can you know a data centre? How can you care? Especially, if you are not a specialist and do not have permission to access one in person. Although, most people do not know or notice data centres, it is necessary to remember the materiality of cloud-technologies and the planetary relations of data centres. This is why the text examines the development and possibilities of an augmented reality data centre experience.
The book can be found here.
June 2026
A new book in the Virtual Lifeworlds book series was published at the end of June, with Estrid Sørensen as one of the editors. As the title suggests, Infrastructures of (Non-)Knowledge: Virtuality and Epistemic Transformations deals with questions of how infrastructures and practices shape what counts as (non-)knowledge in the context of AI-driven infrastructural transformations and digitization of epistemic cultures. The interdisciplinary contributions to this volume offer a broad and nuanced insight into the interrelations between knowledge practices and their infrastructures, including libraries, Wikipedia, human bodies, digital corpora, and universities. Together, they foreground the complexity of knowledge, and invite readers to critically reconsider prevailing epistemic regimes.
The book can be found here.
June 2026
Estrid Sørensen contributed a speculative fabulation to the newly published book Predictions: From Speculative Ethnography to Apocalyptic Testimony (Vol. 1). Her text is one of many predictions in the book, which collects predictions to explore how they can be handled in critical social sciences and humanities disciplines, especially through an STS lens. Predictions not only imagine and anticipate futures, they also show the thoughts, fears and predicaments that we currently face. The subject of the speculative fabulation written by Estrid Sørensen is the future of servers. Although all characters are fictional, the scenes and conversations are inspired by her ethnographic research on data centres in Germany.
The book and more information can be found here.
June 2026
Stefan Laser, along with Mél Hogan and Edward Ongweso Jr., edited the new published book Predictions: From Speculative Ethnography to Apocalyptic Testimony. The book, which is the first volume out of three, makes a case for engaging with practices and cultures of prediction. With a collection of raw, unhinged, despairing, yet also critical and playful predictions the editors wants to generate a conversation as well as a sense of community. Furthermore, this collection serves as an example of how prediction can be handled in critical social sciences and humanities disciplines, especially through an STS lens.
The book and more information can be found here.
June 2026
The Waste in Motion-Kollektiv, of which Stefan Laser is a part, has been published a book about social science research into waste as part of our environment. Throughout the book, the main question explored is how waste shapes the world through its relationship with living beings, objects, places and times. Ultimately, the book shows that the question of where, how, when and for whom waste becomes a challenge can only be answered on a case-by-case basis.
The Waste in Motion-Kollektiv is an interdisciplinary research collective, which emerged from the research network "Abfall in Bewegung. Mobilisierungen von Abfällen und Schadstoffen als soziomaterielle Konfiguration“, funded by the DFG since 2022.
The book and more information can be found here.
10th June 2026, 14:30-15:45, Malmö University
The 2026 Swedish STS conference will take place from June, 10th-12th. On June 10th, Estrid Sørensen and Brit Winthereik will talk about "Data centres as traps“, as part of the session "Algorithms, governance & public institutions“, chaired by Elizabeth Fox Jensen. Among other places, Microsoft currently builds datacentres in Zealand and in Western Jutland of Denmark as well as in the Rheinisches Revier in Germany. The lecture will examine the specific arrangements, conditions and captures at both locations. Building on Corsín Jiménez’s thinking of infrastructures as traps with inherent instabilities, the talk will address the vulnerabilities of big tech and ask about the work of data centres in local landscapes and communities.
More information about the conference and the talk can be found here.
9th June 2026, 17:00-18:30, University Konstanz
As part of the event series Forschungskolloquien Allgemeine Soziologie, in which contributions to sociological theory are discussed on the basis of guest lectures and recent publications, Olga Galanova will give a talk on the communication structures of secrecy and indexicality in Stasi telephone calls. The talk will take place at the Unversity of Konstanz‘s department of sociology.
More information can be found here.
8th June 2026, 16:00-18:00, Zoom
Estrid Sørensen is taking part in the DGEKW lecture series on AI in empirical cultural studies, european ethnology and cultural anthropology, titled Künstliche Intelligenz – Expertisen, Anwendungen und Kritik einer „Schlüsseltechnologie“ in der Empirischen Kulturwissenschaft, Europäischen Ethnologie und Kulturanthropologie. Alongside Moritz Altenried, Estrid Sørensen will give a lecture on ethnographic perspectives on the production and the planetarity of AI. The lecture will address topics such as the extractive dimensions, e.g. of micro chips, data centres and AI training, as well as the use of AI in science. In the end, there will be a discussion. The lecture will be hosted by Katrin Amelang.
More information about the lecture series, including the Zoom link, can be found here.
June 2026
Based on his research in the CRC 1567, Stefan Laser has published an article in the Journal of Cultural Economy: “Encountering the semiconductor industry: fairs and global value chains in motion, from Taiwan to Vietnam.” This article examines how industry events shape markets through a comparison of semiconductor fairs held in 2023 on the outskirts of Taipei and Hanoi. The article draws on ethnographic fieldwork to analyze these industry fairs. While Taiwan’s long-established industry offers a choreographed vision, Vietnam’s event reveals an aspirational configuration, shaped by infrastructural gaps and shifting policy frameworks. While this distinction has emerged, it also may quickly collapse on the fair floor in the form of uncertainty. This, in turn, helps understand the extended planetary relations of data centre configurations, which is the main theme of our sub-project A02 in the CRC Virtual Lifeworlds.
The article can be found here.
June 2026
The 90th Conference of the Japan Society for Information and Management took place in June 2026, in which Ryoko Asai took part. Subsequently, a conference paper by her and Tatsuya Yamazaki titled What Does Politeness Toward AI Mean? A Preliminary Inquiry into Agency, Otherness, Thingness, and Implications for Care was published, in which they explore the matter of generative AI being perceived not only as a language model, but also as an interactive conversation partner, “who” possesses agency over its responses. People often use polite language, honorifics and expressions of gratitude when interacting with chatbots, and Ryoko Asai and Tatsuya Yamazaki explore how these interactive practices reflect how humans view AI as an entity. To do so, they present a preliminary survey on the use of generative AI among college students, which is used to examine the significance of politeness toward generative AI. Additionally, they focus on analyzing the social and ethical implications for research on care that utilizes AI.
The paper (in Japanese) can be found here.
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Last update: Nov 06, 2026
