Inaugural Conference of the Search Engines and Society Network (SEASON 2025)

On behalf of the Search Engines and Society Network (SEASON), we invite you to attend the inaugural conference of the network, to be held at HAW Hamburg, Germany, 24^th – 25^th September 2025.

SEASON is an annual conference that explores the multifaceted role of search engines in today's culture and society. SEASON brings together researchers from different fields and fosters interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration to deepen our understanding of search engines as cultural, societal, and technical artefacts, as well as how they are used in various practices.

After successful workshops in Lund (2021), Vienna (2022), Hamburg (2023) and Birmingham (2024), we feel it is time to broaden the research engagement into a conference series. We are pleased to announce the next edition of SEASON in Hamburg. This year, we aim to develop the conference to invite submissions for presentations, panels, posters, and experimental formats.

Conference theme 

We welcome submissions on topics such as:  

• Social and cultural aspects of relevance
• Epistemic implications of search-engine use
• Search engines and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
• Search engines and disinformation 
• AI and changing patterns of search engine use
• Search engine providers’ responsibility and accountability
• Search engines as multi-sided platforms
• History of web search and web search engines
• Search engine bias and fair search 
• Ethical considerations related to search engines
• Affect and emotional aspects of search engine use
• Information literacy related to search engines
• Search engines and specific groups (children, elderly,...)
• Search engines and studies of ignorance and information avoidance
• Search engines in everyday life and in social practices
• Search engines in educational settings
• Alternative approaches to concepts of indexing in search engines
• Search engines and the role of data voids
• Negotiations of search results (search engine optimization, paid search advertising)
• Search engine comparisons (e.g., comparing results tailored to different locations, comparing results from different search engines)
• Methods for search engine research
• Data collection for search engine studies
• Approaches to “opening the Black Box of search engine rankings”

We welcome conceptual and empirical submissions from a broad range of disciplinary backgrounds, including the humanities, social sciences, and technical disciplines. We welcome approaches transgressing disciplinary boundaries and submissions from individuals from outside academia. Submissions discussing work in progress are welcome. We also encourage students to submit contributions.

Submission categories 

Authors can submit their work in the following categories: 

• Papers: Papers should be submitted in the form of an extended abstract. The maximum length of extended paper abstracts is 1000 words (excluding references).
• Interactive Sessions (for example, panels and workshops): should be designed for 60-90 minutes. The proposal should include the purpose, abstract and format and be a maximum of 1000 words (excluding references). 
• Posters: Posters should be submitted in the form of an abstract with a maximum of 500 words (excluding references).
• Shorts: An opportunity to discuss ongoing research or present interventions (short informal presentations of less than 20 minutes): Proposals should be submitted in the form of abstracts (maximum 500 words, excluding references) that describe the topic of your presentation and include some information about its structure.

Submission Guidelines 

• Papers should be submitted as a .PDF file.
• Place the title of the paper in bold at the top of the first page only. On the next line, include the names of the author(s), along with their email addresses and affiliations.
• References should follow the Harvard referencing style.
• Please ensure the paper has been carefully proofread.

Please submit your contribution at https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=season2025.

Accepted contributions will be available for downloading for conference participants in advance of the conference. All accepted abstracts will be freely accessible to everyone after the conference. 

• Submission for all categories via EasyChair: 30th of April 2025
• Notification: 16th of June 2025
• Revised submissions: 15th of July 2025
• Conference dates: 24-25 September 2025

Registration and conference fee

Register now to join us at the SEASON 2025 Conference: https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=season2025.

The registration fee for SEASON 2025 is €100 (regular) and €30 (student).

Keynote speakers 

Wednesday, September 24, 2025: Prof. Anne Beaulieu: "Search engines beyond search: questions for a critical knowledge infrastructure"

Prof. dr. Anne Beaulieu holds the Aletta Jacobs Chair of Knowledge Infrastructures at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. She is co-author of Data and Society: A Critical Introduction (Sage, 2021), of Smart Grids from a Global Perspective (Springer, 2016), and of Virtual Knowledge: Experimenting in the Humanities and Social Sciences (MIT Press, 2012). She also chairs the editorial board of the Liveable Futures book series at Amsterdam University Press. In 2023-24, she was joint fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study and of the Data Science Centre at the University of Amsterdam. Between 2018 and 2022, she co-coordinated the PhD training network of the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC). This presentation is based on her book Revealing Relations: Knowledge Relations for Liveable Futures (Bristol University Press, 2026).

Abstract: Search engines play a powerful role in ordering knowledge and in shaping interactions with data, sources or documents. The current dominance of ‘search’ has been well documented and various facets (relevance, optimization, ranking, bias) have been examined and refines in sophisticated ways. But as search engines become further embedded in layered knowledge infrastructures, it is all the more important to unearth how search shapes knowledge needs and how these needs are met. In this presentation, I want to share a number of questions to explore important assumptions of search engines: It is possible to imagine other functions for search engines, besides supporting retrieval? Can a search engine succeed otherwise than through best match? Can assumptions be foregrounded so that search engines are more reflexive–at what cost and with which advantages? How do conversational interfaces increase the urgency of questioning these assumptions? These questions can spur new interactions and explorations across lines of work, connecting epistemology and design, ethics and computation, politics and indexing.

Thursday, September 25, 2025: Matthias Spielkamp (Additional information regarding his keynote presentation will be provided shortly)

Matthias Spielkamp is co-founder and executive director of AlgorithmWatch (Theodor Heuss Medal 2018, Grimme Online Nominee 2019, Brandenburger Freiheitspreis 2023) and founder and president of AlgorithmWatch CH. He is a member of the advisory council to the German Digital Services Coordinator (DSC), elected by the German Bundestag. Matthias testified before committees of the Council of Europe, the European Parliament, the German Bundestag and other institutions on automation and AI and was a member of the Global Partnership on AI (GPAI) from 2020-2022. Matthias serves on the governing boards of the German section of Reporters Without Borders and Stiftung Warentest, the advisory councils of Freudenberg Stiftung and the Whistleblower Network and the Expert Committee on Communication/Information of Germany’s UNESCO Commission. He was a fellow of ZEIT Stiftung, Stiftung Mercator and the American Council on Germany. Matthias is editor of the Automating Society reports and has written and edited books on the automation of society, digital journalism and Internet governance. He holds master’s degrees in Journalism from the University of Colorado in Boulder and in Philosophy from the Free University of Berlin.

Programme committee

• Rosie Graham, University of Birmingham, UK
• Jutta Haider, SSLIS, University of Borås, Sweden
• Dirk Lewandowski, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany
• Astrid Mager, Institute of Technology Assessment Vienna (ITA), Austria
• Renée Ridgway, Aarhus University, Denmark
• Sebastian Schultheiß, Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany
• Olof Sundin, Lund University, Sweden
• Kristofer Söderström, Lund University, Sweden

Travel information 

The organisers recommend that participants travel by train. The event will take place at the Faculty of Design, Media and Information at Finkenau 35 in Hamburg. 

Contact Information

We look forward to welcoming you to Hamburg in September. If you have any queries or questions, please contact programme chair Olof Sundin (olof.sundin@kultur.lu.se), or one of the local chairs, Dirk Lewandowski (dirk.lewandowski@haw-hamburg.de) and Sebastian Schultheiß (sebastian.schultheiss@haw-hamburg.de).