AUTOPUBLICS Enters Next Phase with Full Research Team On Board
Together with Principal Investigator Jannie Møller Hartley and Co-PI Andreas Birkbak, the expanded team will investigate how AI-driven personalization shapes media consumption, democratic participation, and the formation of publics.
Anna Schjøtt Hansen’s postdoctoral project examines how AI systems and recommender technologies shape the circulation of media and culture. From streaming platforms to news apps, algorithmic systems increasingly filter, organize, and personalize the content people encounter in everyday life. While earlier studies have focused on how such systems are developed within media organizations, the postdoc project expands this perspective by exploring both the AI models that shape representations of “the public” and the ongoing maintenance and monitoring of deployed systems.
“As AI systems increasingly shape cultural consumption and news distribution, it becomes crucial to understand not only how these systems are developed, but also how the public is modelled within dominant personalization technologies and maintained once these systems are deployed,” says Anna Schjøtt Hansen. She will commence her work on the 1st of June 2026.
Sarah Feldes’ PhD project, Personalized Mediascapes: Echo Chambers or Issue Construction Sites?, approaches personalization from the perspective of citizens and users. The project investigates how people navigate increasingly automated and AI-generated media environments and explores whether personalized media experiences can also function as spaces for engagement and the co-construction of public debate.
“I am interested in how AI shapes participation in public debate, its consequences for citizen engagement and political polarization, and the possibilities for co-construction of public issues through and with algorithms,” says Sarah Feldes. “By focusing on users as co-constructors of media streams and public issues, the project examines democratic participation in times of hyper-personalization and automatization.”
The two projects complement the broader ambitions of AUTOPUBLICS by connecting infrastructural perspectives on AI systems with citizens’ lived experiences of personalized media.
“I really look forward to the collaboration with Sarah and Anna and to bring the four subprojects together answering our main research question theoretically and empirically, namely how personalized media transform how publics come into being, ei. how personalized and automated individual media use translates into issues of collective and common concern,” says PI of the AUTOPUBLICS, Jannie Møller Hartley.