ECE develops a Science and Technology Studies (STS)-informed alternative to principle-driven AI ethics. Rather than treating ethics as an external normative framework to be applied to technological systems, we investigate how normative orders are materially embedded, operationalised, and contested within specific communities of practice and technical infrastructures.
Drawing on STS traditions that analyse the co-production of knowledge, technology, and social order, we approach artificial intelligence not as a neutral tool governed by abstract principles, but as a site where evaluative judgments are stabilised in code, datasets, benchmarks, interfaces, and institutional procedures. Normativity, in this view, is not merely articulated in ethical guidelines; it is enacted in model architectures, content moderation pipelines, alignment strategies, auditing practices, dataset curation, and red-teaming protocols.
Our research focuses on concrete implementation contexts in which evaluative decisions become sociotechnically consequential. Through ethnographic fieldwork, infrastructural analysis, and technical audits, we reconstruct how normative assumptions traverse between micro-level design choices and macro-level governance arrangements. This movement across scales allows us to identify conflicts, asymmetries, and generative frictions that remain invisible in abstract principle-based approaches.
Central to our programme is a relational concept of normativity. Normative claims are understood as situated and historically embedded orders of evaluation that are mediated by technical systems. This perspective enables: first, the empirical reconstruction of how normative orders are stabilised in practice; second, their explicit critical assessment in light of broader political and ethical commitments.
For more information, see our upcoming Special Issue on Empirical Ethics at the newly founded Cambridge Forum for AI: Culture and Society.
Deadline passed, first Publications expected in May 2026.
May 11th, 10.00-13.00, Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S)
IKB building, 2nd floor
Guest Speakers:
Daniel Mügge, Professor for Political Economy and Transnational Governance at University of Amsterdam
Wulf Loh, Research Group Leader Ethics of AI & Robots, University of Tübingen
Registration here.
Paula Helm, Beatrice Bonami, Roanne van Voorst, Adriano da Silva (2026): Introduction. Crafting Alternative Futures through Mutual Learning. In: Beatrice Bonami, Paula Helm, Roanne van Voorst, Adriano da Silva (eds.): Reimagining Knowledge in the Amazon Rainforest. Crafting Alternative Futures. Leuven University Press.
Selin Gerlek, Paula Helm (2026): Matters of Concern. Modes of Inquiry. On the Formation of Empirical Ethics. On the Formation of Empirical Ethics, in: Amsterdam Institute for Advanced Studies Anniversary Edition.
Paula Helm (2026). Privacy in the Age of Platform Capitalism: What is at Stake for Individuals, Groups and Democracy? Oxford Encyclopedia of Science and Technology Studies. Oxford University Press.
Paula Helm & Selin Gerlek (2026). EMPIRICAL AI ETHICS. Relationality, Care, Transformation, Cambridge Forum on AI, Cambridge University Press (under review).
Benjamin Lipp, Paula Helm, Athanasios Karafillidis & Roser Pujadas (2025). De-centring the interface. Towards the integrated study of interfacial relations. Information, Communication & Society, 0(0), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2024.2413110
Paula Helm (2024). How platform power undermines diversity-oriented innovation. Internet Policy Review, 13(2). Special Issue (Ed. Thomas Poell, Jose van Dijck, Robyn Caplan, David Nieborg): Theorizing and Locating Platform Power. https://doi.org/10.14763/2024.2.1780
Paula Helm, Benjamin Lipp & Roser Pujadas (2024). Generating Reality, Silencing Debate. Synthetic Data as Discursive Device. Big Data & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951724124944
Paula Helm, Gábor Bella, Gertraud Koch & Fausto Giunchiglia (2024): Language Technology and Diversity. How Language Modelling Bias Causes Epistemic Injustice. Ethics Inf Technol 26, 8 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-023-09742-6
Gertraud Koch, Gábor Bella, Paula Helm & Fausto Giunchiglia (2024): Layers of Technology in Pluriversal Design. Decolonising AI Language Technology with the Live Language Initiative. Journal for Co-Design, https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2405.01783.
Gábor Bella, Paula Helm, Gertraud Koch & Fausto Giunchiglia. (2024). Tackling Language Modelling Bias in Support of Linguistic Diversity. In The 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT ’24), June 03–06, 2024, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. ACM, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3630106.3658925
Paula Helm & Tobias Matzner (2024). Co-addictive human–machine configurations: Relating critical design and algorithm studies to medical-psychiatric research on “problematic Internet use”. New Media & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448231165916
Paula Helm, Amalia De Götzen, Luca Cernuzzi, Salvador Ruiz Correa, Shyam Diwakar & Daniel Gatica-Perez (2023). Diversity and Neocolonialism in Big Data Research. Big Data & Society. https://doi.org/10.1177/205395172312068
Beatrice Bonami, Nazialo Filizola, Adriano da Silva, Marina Magalhães, Joao Sateré, Josias Sateré, Roanne van Voorst & Paula Helm (2023). Water and Technologies - Community Material for Water and Digital Sustainability in the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest. https://doi.org/10.0001/99769.
Paula Helm, Loizos Michael & Laura Schelenz (2022): Diversity by Design? Balancing the Protection and Inclusion of Users in Online Social Networks, in: Proceedings of the 2022 AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, Oxford, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.1145/3514094.3534149
Maximilian Fischer, Simon Hirsbrunner, …, Daniel Keim & Paula Helm (2022): Promoting Ethical Awareness in Communication Analysis: Investigating Potentials and Limits of Visual Analytics, in: Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency, Seoul, South Korea. https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533151
Paula Helm & Thilo Hagendorff (2021): Beyond the Prediction Paradigm. Chances and Risks of AI for Criminal Investigation, in: Luciano Floridi, Jeff Ward, Cynthia Rudin (eds.): Artificial Intelligence and the Rule of Law. 84 Duke Law and Contemporary Problems. Duke University Press, 1--17.
Paula Helm (2020): Longing for a Selfless Self and other Ambivalences of Anonymity, in: Anon Collective (ed.): Book of Anonymity. Earth/Milky Way: Punctum Books: 401-423.
Paula Helm (2018): Treating Sensitive Topics Online. A Privacy Dilemma, Ethics & Information Technology, 20(4): 303-313. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10676-018-9482-4
Paula Helm (2017): Suchtkultur und Gruppentherapie. Vom anonymen Ich zum anonymen Wir, Wiesbaden: Springer VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.
SS 2026:
Join Our Team
We are looking for a 100% PostDoc-researcher from May onwards. Follow this link and scoll to the bottom https://www.uni-frankfurt.de/48794987/Zentrale_Einrichtungen
Or contact us if you have any questions.TBA
