ITeG Lectures 2026/2027

Samuel Greef is a political scientist and computer scientist who has earned his habilitation at the University of Kassel. He works as a private lecturer and research assistant at the University of Kassel, focusing on state modernization, digital policy, state governance, labor relations, right-wing populism, civil society, and organized interests. In his spare time, he programs and writes scripts in Java, Objective-C, PHP, JavaScript, and the BASH shell.
https://www.samuel-greef.de/    
His habilitation thesis, “Staat und Staatlichkeit im digitalen Zeitalter” (The State and Statehood in the Digital Age: Political Governance in Transition) was published in 2023 by Transcript. DOI: 10.14361/9783839470657

New Materialist perspectives have gained increasing attention in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), offering new ways to address pressing challenges such as climate change or inequality. By foregrounding the entanglement of humans, technologies, materials, and environments, New Materialism challenges anthropocentric perspectives and narratives of technological salvation. Yet its integration into HCI research and design practice remains difficult. In this talk, I explore the promises and challenges of New Materialist HCI and present examples of how theory can be understood and transformed to inform practice. I conclude with reflections on lessons learned and future directions.

Verena Fuchsberger is Associate Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Division at the University of Salzburg, Austria. Her research examines the relations between humans, technologies, materials, and environments across diverse contexts, including intergenerational remote relationships, makerspaces, and industrial production. Through her current research project, Thinking with Things, she investigates how New Materialist theory can meaningfully intersect with HCI research and design practices. 

My talk examines how workplace neurotechnology reshapes labor subjectivity under AI-mediated governance. By neurotechnology, I mean cognitive and sensory interfaces that access, monitor, interpret, and modify neural and sensory processes, thereby translating aspects of mental activity into observable data. Proponents claim these systems optimize performance, track attentiveness, and warn of fatigue; critics warn they render workers legible and thus governable within algorithmically driven management systems. I argue that neurotechnology is not simply a more invasive form of biometric surveillance but a broader shift in how cognition is understood, measured, and governed, one that turns attention, focus, and affect into a new form of human capital. Once neural states become quantifiable and comparable, they function as credentials, metrics through which workers are ranked, valued, and rendered employable. A growing literature on neuroethics tends to specify how these systems should operate (ethics) rather than interrogate the political conditions that make their authority possible, illuminating consequences while leaving unexamined the transformations in agency, cognition, and governance that accompany deployment. 
The question is therefore not simply whether neurotechnologies are ethical, but how they reshape the conditions under which labor subjectivities are constituted, valued, and governed. Through the marketing discourse and technical architecture of leading providers, the article shows how the promise of objective neural measurement operationalizes this governance while displacing responsibility onto the worker and argues that the datafication of cognition reconfigures the criteria of employability itself. In this way, it contributes not only to the biopolitics of neurotechnology but also to debates on AI in the workplace.

Peter Mantello is an artist, filmmaker and Professor of Media Studies at Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University in Japan. His area of specialization focuses on the intersection between technology, conflict, Artificial Intelligence and surveillance. Combining media studies, International Relations theories, film studies, data studies, and technologies studies, he is interested in the various feedback loops between media, technology, conflict, and popular culture.
More information on his website at APU Peter Mantello

AI is not just a material system, possibly an object or an agent. It is a continuous process animated by various interconnected actors: developers, manufacturers, raw material producers, operators, deployers, and so forth. In short, underlying AI is a value chain, both digital and industrial. This construction poses a twofold question for the law and its allocation of responsibility: Law needs to provide an answer on how AI operations are to be qualified as action within such a value chain as well as develop rules on who in the value chain - what actor or even the value chain as a collective - should bear responsibility for harm. 
In this lecture, I will discuss proposals for how to conceive of responsibility in and of the AI value chain. To that end, I will use social theory-inspired approaches to the law, specifically socio-legal institutionalism. 

Anna Beckers is a professor of private law and social theory at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on the institutions of private law—contracts, property, liability, corporations, and competition—and their relationship to societal changes, particularly digitalization, corporate sustainability, and the protection of human rights, as well as changes in the structure of global trade. On this latter topic, Anna Beckers is currently leading a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) on the possibilities and conditions for a responsive legal framework for global value chains (CHAINLAW, ERC StG 2023–2028). In addition, her work focuses on the liability implications of the use of artificial intelligence. Anna Beckers has published extensively on this topic, including the co-authored monograph *Algorithmic Actants, Hybrids, Swarms: Three Liability Regimes for Artificial Intelligence*,published by Suhrkamp in 2024.