As of July 2025, Anna Lena Menne has joined the Digital Humanities division at the Department of Media Studies at Paderborn University as a research associate. She works as part of the independent research group “Development of Symmetrical Mental Models,” led by Dr. Christian Schulz and associated with the Collaborative Research Centre TRR 318 “Constructing Explainability.”
Anna Lena has a transdisciplinary background in media and communication studies, as well as global studies. Her academic path has taken her from Berlin (Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) to Leeds, Pretoria, and Bangkok, where she engaged with contrasting knowledge traditions, navigating tensions between dominant Eurocentric frameworks and alternatively situated perspectives on power, inequality, and digital infrastructures.
Motivated by these encounters, she initiated and led the X-Tutorial project “Digital Positionality” (Berlin University Alliance, 2022-2023), a student-led research initiative that developed a practical toolkit for critically exploring digital situatedness and its socio-ecological implications through participatory and action research methods. In engaging with everyday users in Berlin, the project surfaced how difficult it can be to imagine alternative technological futures, often accompanied by a perceived inevitability of the status quo and a prevailing sense that “things can’t be changed anyway.”
Building on these insights, her current work explores epistemic-affective tensions in interactions with large language models (LLMs), approached as technologies of anticipation. She is particularly interested in how such breakdowns or “cracks” can open space for situated, socially embedded practices of explanation and societal transformation. Rather than aiming to produce fixed answers, Anna Lena sees her research as contributing to the co-creation of alternative futures where meaning and agency can be renegotiated.
We warmly welcome her to the team and look forward to the collaborative research and dialogue ahead.
