About
What
The RMU Data Dialogue 2026 is dedicated to fostering critical and creative perspectives on data visualization, algorithmic practices, and digital infrastructures. It brings together emerging scholars and practitioners to explore how data and their visual representations shape perception, knowledge, and power in contemporary societies.
Participants will engage with current debates in critical data and computational studies, addressing issues such as data ethics, algorithmic bias, visualization politics, digital surveillance, and data justice. This year’s program centers on the idea of visualizing data as critical practice, understood as using visualization not merely to display information but to interrogate, disrupt, and reimagine how data constructs realities, governs attention, and influences action.
The RMU Data Dialogue combines hands-on workshops, exploration groups, and inputs from international experts, who will share best practices as well as fail stories from research and design. Participants will be invited to experiment with critical, artistic, and speculative visualization techniques, opening up new ways of seeing and questioning data.
Who
The event is designed for emerging researchers from the educational and social sciences, the arts, and computational fields who engage with questions of data, visualization, and critique. We invite participants who
- explore data visualization, algorithmic systems, and critical computational practices,
- are interested in visual and aesthetic dimensions of critique, and
- seek to connect critical theory, creative practice, and digital research methodologies.
Beyond academia, the event also welcomes creative technologists, data journalists, designers, and policymakers who critically engage with the social, cultural, and political implications of visualization in public life.
Where & When
Where — Goethe University Frankfurt
When — 9–11 December 2026
RMU
Goethe University Frankfurt, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, and Technical University of Darmstadt formed the strategic alliance of the Rhine-Main Universities (RMU) in 2015. The universities have a combined total of more than 90,000 students and 1,500 professors and cooperate closely in research, studying and teaching. These renowned research universities are shaping the Frankfurt-Rhine-Main region as an internationally visible academic hub.
The RMU Data Dialogue 2026 is hosted by the Center for Critical Computational Studies (C3S) at Goethe University Frankfurt.
Funding
The RMU Data Dialogue 2026 is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) as part of the Global Think Camp initiative.