Visual AI politics/politics of visual AI: Digital Politics Summer School 2025

24-27 June, online

Our Digital Politics Summer School is celebrating its fifth anniversary! This year, the school is focusing on visual generative AI. Details of speakers, call for workshop participation, and programme are coming soon.

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.

Provisional pogramme

24 June: Keynote by Liv Hausken
25 June: Virtual launch of a Visual AI Literacy resource
26 June: Masterclass with Sam Martin: Sing Through the Machine: Visual AI Tools for Research, Creativity, and Critical Practice.
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
27 June: Networking session (by application only)

Registration

The keynote, masterclass and roundtable are open to all. Attendance is free but registration is required. Eventbrite registration links will follow soon.

We are also inviting applications for participation in a 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.