Anna Jobin
anna.jobin@unifr.ch
+41 26 300 8470
0041 26 300 84 70
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4649-7812
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Assistant Professor,
Human-IST - Human-centered Interaction Science and Technology
PER 21 bu. A408
Bd de Pérolles 90
1700 Fribourg
Biography
Prof. Dr. Anna Jobin is an assistant professor at the interfaculty Human-IST Institute at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). She has a multidisciplinary background in sociology, economics, and information management. A fervent advocate of connected thinking, Prof. Dr. Jobin was elected as an inaugural member of the Swiss Young Academy (2020-2025) and is also an advisory member at the Centre for Media, Communication and Information Research (ZeMKI) of the University of Bremen, and an associate member of the Sciences and Technologies Laboratory of Lausanne University. Previous research affiliations include EPFL, ETH Zurich, Tufts University and Cornell University. She volunteers as a board member of the Swiss STS Association and bridges academia and policy as president of the Swiss Federal Media Commission, an extra-parliamentary commission tasked with advising the Swiss Federal Council on media policy.
Her research is situated at the nexus of science, digital technology and society, with a particular focus on interaction with AI and algorithmic systems, (digital) ethics in research and citizen science, and AI governance. Her work has been published notably in Nature Machine Intelligence, Social Media + Society, AI & Society. As an internationally recognized expert on the intersection of digital technology, new media and society, her research and expertise have been featured in the MIT Technology Review (USA), El País (ESP), Aftenposten (NOR), ZDF (GER), NZZ (CH) and other venues.
Research and publications
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Publications
28 publications
Conspiracy theories and misinformation in digital media: An international expert assessment of challenges, trends, and interventions
Daniela Mahl, Sabrina H. Kessler, Mike S. Schäfer, Anna Jobin, Jing Zeng, Fanny Georgi, Communications (2025) | Journal article -
Research projects
The Human Side of AI: Navigating Expertise in the Era of Large Language Models
Status: Ongoing10002211 - Performing Artificial Intelligence: Governance, Agency, Action–An Interdisciplinary Inquiry
Status: OngoingStart 01.03.2025 End 28.02.2029 Funding SNSF Open project sheet Originally grounded in the concept “that every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it” (McCarthy et al 1956), Artificial Intelligence (AI) is now a pervasively used “umbrella term” (Rip & Voß 2019) that mediates between science and society. Co-produced at the intersection of the social and technical (Lindgren 2023; Holton & Boyd 2021; Roberge & Castelle 2021; Jobin & Katzenbach 2023), the entity labeled “AI” appears to have become a “monster” (Haraway 2013) or a “hybrid” (Latour 2012)–a bizarre mix of nature and culture, technology and society. Yet, what has been largely missing from the growing flood of literature, technologies, discourses and social-technical objects is a sustained focus on and differentiated answer to a simple question: What does this thing labeled “AI” actually do in specific situations? Performing AI (PAI) takes the perspective that AI is never “agentic on its own” (Suchman 2023), “never pure” (Shapin 2010) and “never alone” (Mol 2002). Instead, whatever comes to count as “AI” is contingent upon specific discursive framings, material agencies and situated uses. Exploring the multi-scalar, hybrid registers of “AI in action,” PAI is an interdisciplinary inquiry into AI through the concepts of performance and performativity. Performativity “shifts the focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality [...] to matters of practices/doings/actions” (Barad 2003). In particular, PAI explores three aspects of AI-based performance: 1) as descriptions and models that not only describe the world but enact it (Austin 1975; Barad 2007; Callon 2007; Cossette & Salter 2024); 2) as material agencies that are temporally enacted by human and nonhuman actants (Latour 1996); and 3) as situated action where human-technical action arises in “the flux of real activity” (Suchman 2007; Nardi 1996). Bringing together policy discourse analysis, experimental design research and multi-sited video ethnography, the rationale for PAI is three-fold: conceptual, empirical and oriented towards renewed public engagement. It is an attempt to grasp AI from a multi-perspectival lens that unites the social, natural and human sciences with the digital arts, understanding AI as a cultural object which is contested, contingent and dynamic. Navigating the Media as Early Career Academics (AcaMedia)
Status: Completed