Kiran Kappeler Receives the 2025 SGKM Dissertation Award
Kiran Kappeler has been awarded the 2025 Dissertation Award by the Swiss Association of Communication and Media Research (SGKM/SSCM/SACM). She completed her PhD at IKMZ last summer and is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Tracking and Society at the University of Copenhagen, where she explores the potential role of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the green transition in Europe as part of the GREENWATCH project.
In her dissertation “Negotiating Digital Technology Use in the Highly Digitized Swiss Society – A Mixed-Method Analysis of the Digital Practices of Individuals”, Kiran explored how individuals navigate risks of digital technology use like data-fueled surveillance, the distortion of information through algorithmization, and threats to subjective well-being related to digital technology use. To do so, she combined a user-centered and a critical data-studies perspective and used representative surveys and qualitative interviews to investigate four digital practices and related factors: internet usage and digital skills, self-help strategies against algorithmic risks, dataveillance imaginaries and the related self-inhibition in digital communication, as well as resistance to digital technologies. Her thesis can be found open access here: https://doi.org/10.5167/uzh-261196.