Location: online

Our Digital Politics Summer School is celebrating its fifth anniversary! This year, the school is focusing on visual generative AI.

When AI image generators were first popularised in 2023, they were perceived as leading to a new crisis of deepfakes and misinformation, particularly dangerous in cases of reporting war and human suffering, because of the dire consequences of war-time misinformation. Many media scholars view AI as a significant threat, that can lead to a new scale of media manipulation, an erosion of sense of truth, and a crisis of visual evidence. Others suggest that visual generative AI leads to a new form of synthetic realism and a potentially powerful political storytelling. Between these polarising approaches, much remains unexplored when it comes to visual AI politics and the politics of visual AI: the biases in representation; the absence of visual digital and political literacy; the lack of social justice considerations in both the techno-hype around AI-enabled possibilities and the fears around AI-induced harms; and the need for complex and interdisciplinary thinking around the rapidly expanding use of AI-generated images in political landscapes.

This summer school brings together established scholars, early career researchers and PhD students, to learn about, discuss, and experiment with visual generative AI, combining insights from media and communication studies, politics, visual criminology, AI art, and computational science.

Programme

24 June: Keynote by Liv Hausken, 2:00-2.30pm BST. Register
25 June: Virtual launch of a Visual AI Literacy resource, all day. Register.
26 June: Masterclass with Sam Martin: Sing Through the Machine: Visual AI Tools for Research, Creativity, and Critical Practice, 10:00am-12noon BST. Register.
27 June: Roundtable: Visual AI politics/politics of visual AI. With Donatella Della Ratta, Miriyam Aouragh, Nataliia Laba, Roger Canals Vilageliu and Yoav Galai, hosted by Adi Kuntsman and Jessica Elias, 9.30-11.30am BST. Register
27 June: Networking session: by invitation only, 1.00-3.00pm BST.

Registration

Attendance is free but registration is required. Please register separately for each event you would like to attend. Masterclass places are limited due to the interactive nature of the activity- please only register if you can commit to attending. Networking session is by application only (see below) – the call is now closed and we will be contacting all applicants shortly. 

We are inviting applications for participation in the networking session. This session is for you if:

– Your research focuses on the use of visual generative AI in contexts of politics, violence or social injustice
– You would like to collaborate on a jointly produced map of ideas and concepts
– You are interested in being part of an international research network on the politics of visual AI.

To be considered, please send a 200 word description of your research and a short bio (no longer than 50 words) to digitalpoliticsmanmet@gmail.com by 19th May 2025. Applicants will be contacted before the end of May.