The Digital Media and Society Fellowship Program is supported by the Chair of Media and Communication Studies and funded by the University of Leipzig.
Fellow 2024: Malte Ziewitz, Department of Science & Technology Studies, Cornell University
Malte Ziewitz is Associate Professor at the Department of Science & Technology Studies at Cornell University. An ethnographer and sociologist, he studies the changing role of governance and regulation in, of, and through digitally networked environments. His recent work has looked at the lived experience of credit scoring subjects, the search engine optimization (SEO) industry, and attempts at algorithmic regulation. At Cornell, he also directs the Digital Due Process Clinic, a clinical research program that helps ordinary people cope with, understand, and challenge automated decision systems. He holds a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, an M.P.A. from Harvard University, and a First State Exam in Law from the University of Hamburg.
Fellow 2024: Manuel Menke, Institute of Communication, University of Copenhagen
Manuel Menke is Associate Professor at the Institute of Communication at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He studied journalism and political science in Bamberg and Mainz, completed his PhD at the University of Augsburg in 2017 and was a postdoc at the LMU in Munich until his move to Copenhagen in 2020. In his research, he focuses on memory and nostalgia in (digital) media, politics and society, the role of users in the emergence and spread of scandals, and emotions, hate and well-being in journalism. Menke is PI in the project "PastForward: The political uses of the past in digital discourses about Nordic futures (2023 - 2026)" and Co-PI in the project "EXPOSING: The Public Value of Socio-Mediated Scandals in the Digital Age (2024 - 2028)". He has been a founding member of the International Media and Nostalgia Network since 2015 and is currently also Chair and founding member of the ECREA Temporary Working Group Affect, Emotion & Media.
Fellow 2024: Benjamin Mako Hill, Department of Communication, University of Washington
Benjamin Mako Hill is a social scientist and technologist. In both roles, he works to understand the social dynamics that shape online communities. His work focuses on communities engaged in the peer production of digital public goods—like Wikipedia and Linux. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and a founding member of the Community Data Science Collective. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in UW's Department of Human-Centered Design & Engineering, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and Information School. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and an affiliate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science—both at Harvard University. He has also been an activist, developer, contributor, and leader in the free and open source software and free culture movements for more than two decades as part of the Debian, Ubuntu, and Wikimedia projects. He is the author of several best-selling technical books and has served terms as a member of the the Free Software Foundation board of directors and an advisor to the Wikimedia Foundation. Hill has a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab and a PhD from MIT in an interdepartmental program between the Sloan School of Management and the Media Lab.