Current Projects

Visual politics in contemporary digital environments

Xin Zhou

My PhD project focuses on visual politics in contemporary digital environments. I study how state and organizational actors use short-video platforms, particularly TikTok, to disseminate political narratives and influence transnational audiences. Using computational and multimodal methods, my research analyzes large-scale visual and audiovisual data to understand how platform structures, algorithms, and content features shape the production, circulation, and visibility of political communication. The project aims to advance empirical knowledge on digital propaganda and the role of visual media in global information flows.

Twitch as a Platform for Political Opinion Formation

Maria F. Grub, Antonia Wurm, Julian Kauk

This project investigates live-streaming as an emerging mode of political opinion formation and a key site of incidental exposure to political content. Focusing on the live-streaming platform Twitch, the study combines computational approaches (topic modeling, sentiment and emotion analysis) with qualitative methods (interviews). Through this mixed-methods approach, the project analyzes the thematic structures, affective dynamics, and interaction patterns that shape political communication in German Twitch streams. By examining where and how especially young audiences encounter and engage with political information in real time, the project advances research on politainment, participatory political communication, and the role of live interaction in facilitating incidental political exposure. This project is funded by the LIBERTY Connect Fund. 

Strategic Narratives in the Age of Transnational Influence Campaigns: Formation, Projection, and Audience Reception Across Diverse Information Environments 

Kostiantyn Yanchenko, Edda Humprecht

The project investigates how foreign actors employ strategic narratives to influence democratic societies. Theoretically, it moves beyond a narrow focus on disinformation to include a broader range of understudied forms of manipulative influence. It draws on Strategic Narrative Theory from international relations and applies it within communication research to analyze the full process of narrative influence, including formation, projection, and audience reception. Empirically, the project adopts a cross-country and cross-actor comparative approach to identify the structural characteristics that contribute to the effectiveness of narrative influence. It also examines societal resilience to foreign influence, with particular attention to strategic awareness as a key factor influencing how narratives are received.

Resilience to Disinformation in Comparative Perspective: 

Edda Humprecht

 This project examines how citizens in different democracies perceive, interpret, and engage with mis- and disinformation. It integrates large-scale surveys, platform data, and contextual indicators to identify protective factors that enhance societal resilience. The project provides insights into how media systems, political cultures, and technological developments interact to shape vulnerability to manipulation. 

AI-Driven Transformations of Public Communication

Edda Humprecht

This research explores the role of artificial intelligence in shaping digital information environments. It analyzes AI-generated content, algorithmic curation, and emerging forms of automation in communication, asking how these innovations influence political discourse, media trust, and democratic engagement. The project contributes to theoretical and empirical debates about communication and media change in the context of rapid technological innovation.