Die Anmeldung beginnt erst am 02.10.2026 um 08:00 Uhr. Sie endet am 12.10.2026 um 23:59 Uhr

Digital technologies have become central features of our lives. The question of how they are transforming what it means to be human currently figures high in public debates around artificial intelligence and age limits for social media. This question is the primary concern of anthropology as a discipline. In the past two decades, anthropology has approached digital technologies and produced important innovations in their study. This seminar addresses some of the central concepts and methodologies to approach the digital as that which can be reduced to the binary code of 0 and 1. It discusses recent case studies on the increasing digital entanglements of everyday lives in some of the central fields, including social media, artificial intelligence, algorithmic governance, big data, biometric identification, digital economies and inequalities such as race, gender and dis-/ability. Methodologically, a central tenet of anthropological research has been the “being there” in physical spaces. The seminar explores new research methodologies and reflexivities that go beyond that, including digital ethnography and multimodal anthropology, and offers space to students to test these methods in exploratory case studies.

In the seminar, students learn to define and explain recent concepts of digital anthropology that help them to analyze digital technologies and their impact on human lives. They learn how to apply them to new contexts of their choice and reflect on further conceptual developments and research gaps. Students will also learn research methodologies of digital ethnography and apply them to new case studies. The seminar will encourage participants to reflect ethically on the use of digital technologies and the implications for academic study. They will collectively develop how social change prompted by digital technologies plays out differently across specific social groups and contexts. This will sensitize students to critically examine their effects on societal power relations such as racism and antisemitism, gender and sexuality, class and dis-/ability and reflect on alternative world-making practices. Digital technologies will thus emerge as contested and asymmetric fields in which students will position their own views in relation to other perspectives. Students are encouraged to reflect critically on their own entanglements with the digital and strengthen their autonomy in navigating their uses.

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