- On 3 September 2026, Thomas Stieber will give a lecture entitled “High-Quality Production Through Routine Work? The Case of German High-Quality Viticulture”. The presentation will outline the findings of the DFG project “Skilled Seasonal Labour in Agriculture? Employment and Work Requirements in Quality Viticulture”. Starting from the observation that – contrary to widespread narratives – the production of high-quality wine cannot be achieved through unskilled, menial labour in the vineyard, the talk will discuss what this means in terms of the working conditions, career trajectories and levels of participation of the workforce, which consists almost exclusively of migrant workers.
- Together with Christian Koß (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf), Andrea Hense will speak on 4 September 2026 on the topic ‘Social Concepts: Between Qualitative Reconstruction and AI-Based Coding’.
In their talk, they will explore the question of whether deep-learning models can reconstruct social concepts in qualitative interview data in a similar way to interpretative analyses carried out by researchers. They conclude that AI emerges as a new epistemic actor which, whilst capable of ‘qualitative’ coding, operates according to fundamentally different logics of abstraction and generalisation.
Further information on the event and the programme can be found here: [LINK]