Written by: Jasmin Degeling

Abstract: This article addresses the relationship between differences and the digital in intertwined online and offline spheres with regard to digital fascism. It contributes a media theoretic approach to recent theories of contemporary fascism in social and cultural sciences as well as philosophy with a special emphasis on gender and queer studies perspectives. The first part discusses four recent theories of contemporary fascism and their specific approaches to defining both fascism and media. The second part introduces gender media studies’ performative concept of mediation to adequately account for the emergent, diffractive media processes digital fascism unfolds. One main focus is to emphasize the necessity of an intersectional perspective on the critique of fascism by taking into account that fascism is a form of differential violence affecting how gender, sex, race, and ability are constructed and rendered sensible. The article closes by suggesting that contemporary (digital) media condition what is rendered sensible as one crucial feature of fascism today.

Keywords: queer theory, right wing violence, far right terrorism, alt-right, critical theory, affect theory

Written by: Samira Ibnelkaïd

Abstract: This paper investigates the everyday interactional digital practices of racialized high-skilled migrants in Europe allowing them to enact a translocal agency. The latter refers to the capacity of migrants to actively engage with, shape and influence multiple socio-geographic landscapes, thereby fostering a sense of belonging and identity across borders, and subverting traditional, Eurocentric frameworks that confine agency to static, bounded spaces. The focus is on the case of Finland insofar as it has a complex and prejudiced relationship to racialized peoples through its heretofore overlooked colonial history. Drawing on an interdisciplinary methodology grounded in decolonial visual ethnography, multimodal interaction analysis, and critical phenomenology, this video-based research highlights how situated interactional digital practices of experience-sharing, knowledge-building, and community-enacting participate in the enactment by racialized translocals of their agency and networks of belonging. This research asserts that, in the digital era, racialized migrants ought to become empowered agents of their trajectories.

Keywords: Translocality, Migration, Agency, Anti-colonialism, Anti-racism, Digital Technologies

Written by: Paul Eisewicht, Tilo Grenz, & Nico Maximilian Steinmann

Abstract: In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many companies were forced to respond to changing conditions in terms of economic pressure, hygienic protection measures and moral obligations to customers and employees. Social media proved to be a form of consumer monitoring of the behaviour of business organizations, on the one hand documenting the economic consequences of the pandemic and the reactions of companies and on the other hand taking a critical stance, promoting organized resistance and sanctioning misconduct. Companies manoeuvred themselves into an arena of mediated visibility. Using the case of paid sick leave at Kroger, this contribution follows the shift from asymmetrical to increasingly reciprocal and counter-directed forms of surveillance. This article focuses on the temporality of this dispersed consumer knowledge cultures. Contrary to collective or homogenizing perspectives on these protest cultures, the article focuses on the dynamic difference between the individual and the collective, here exemplified by the specific case of a pioneer journalist. Thus, collective action over time is based on the temporal localisation of media activities in time, a knowledgecultural practice that is introduced in the article as “temporal fixation” (as a chronopolitical practice by pioneer journalists). To capture these knowledge-cultural dynamics, the article develops a novel process-orientated approach that combines eventful sociology and the arena approach.

Keywords: Social Media, Corporate Misconduct, Consumer Resistance, Counterhegemonic Speech, Social Media Surveillance, Temporal Fixation, Chronopolitics, Pioneer Journalism

Written by: Maria Gretzky Shtoltz

Abstract: This essay examines the emergence of large language models, focusing on ChatGPT, in the academic sphere. While most studies have focused on the tangible outputs produced by LLMs, the potential and the challenges they introduce, this essay proposes a shift in perspective that recognizes LLM not merely as a computational tool but as an "Algorithmic Author"—an entity that both shapes and is shaped by the social, cultural, and political dynamics of the academic field. Inspired by Michel Foucault's concept of the "author-function" (1980) the term "Algorithmic Author" is used to analyse how ChatGPT is discursively constructed and contested within different academic groups. Drawing on preliminary findings from interviews and ethnographic observations in a public research university, the essay identifies three distinct groups—senior management, the center for teaching and learning staff, and young researchers—who frame and construct the algorithmic author as a threat, an opportunity, or an ambivalent space.

Keywords: Large language model (LLM), AI and higher education, ChatGPT, Algorithmic author, Michel Foucault