Gemma Newlands, Eliane Bucher, Christian Fieseler, Christoph Lutz and Alexander (Alex) Buhmann had a total of nine contributions and three awards at this year's Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA) in Washington DC. The conference took place from May 24 to May 28 and gathered more than 3500 leading communication scholars from around the world. It is the largest and most prestigious conference in this discipline and this year's edition was the largest ever.
Gemma not only presented her research but also received a best student paper award in the Organizational Communication division for her contribution "Algorithmic Surveillance in the Gig Economy: The Organisation of Work Through Lefebvrian Conceived Space". In addition, the paper won the best presentation award within her session.
Alex won the best paper award in the Public Diplomacy Interest Group for his paper "Rearranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic: Explicating Motivations Behind Evaluation Behavior in Public Diplomacy". The article is co-authored with Erich Sommerfeldt from the University of Maryland and emerged during a research stay of Erich at the Nordic Centre in 2018. The paper is forthcoming in the International Communication Gazette under a new title ("Explicating Motivations behind Evaluation in U.S. Public Diplomacy").
Christian and Eliane presented their paper "How 'Slacking' Became the New Working: The Fetishization of Work Processes in the Digital Age" in the Communication & Technology division.
In addition to her best paper award winning contribution and in collaboration with Christoph, Gemma presented the article "Crowdwork and the Mobile Underclass: Mobile Connectivity on Amazon Mechanical Turk" in the Mobile Communication division. Her short paper "Pseudo-AI: The workplace implications of ontological obfuscation" was part of the Human-Machine Communication Preconference, which took place immediately prior to the main conference.
Also at the Human-Machine Communication Preconference, Christoph presented his contribution "Robots as communicative agents: Investigating the privacy implications", which is in collaboration with Christian Hoffmann (University of Leipzig) and Maren Schöttler (Free University of Berlin) and forthcoming in the journal Mobile Media & Communication. Finally, Christoph had three papers at the main conference: "Powerless and Distrustful, But Not Resigned: An Exploration of Privacy Cynicism in Germany" (co-authored with Christian Hoffmann and Giulia Ranzini from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), "Inequalities in Online Political Participation: the Role of Privacy Concerns", and "Tinder Together: Collective Uses of Mobile Dating Apps" (co-authored with Christian Hoffmann and Helene Lamprecht from the University of Leipzig).