Josefa Francke was a research associate at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans-Bredow-Institut (HBI) within the research programme "
Regulatory Structures and the Emergence of Rules in Online Spaces" from April 2022 until June 2023.
Her research focus lies on participative-democratic social structures and human rights globally and in the digital space. She worked on the
project "Platform://Democracy - Global Best Practice Models for the Democratic Design of Hybrid Online Orders" and investigated ways of rendering commercially oriented, global online platforms accountable to public values.
While studying law at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, she specialized in public international law and internet law. She also worked as a student assistant at the chair of Prof. Dr. Achim Seifert for civil law, German and European labor law and comparative law, and took part in the Philip C. Jessup Mootcourt on public international law. Lastly, she worked as a student assistant at the HBI.
In addition, Josefa Francke studied as a DAAD fellow at the Centre for Human Rights at the University of Pretoria, South Africa, where she concentrated on the democratization of authoritarian systems, transformative constitutionalism, and human rights in Africa and globally. As part of the LLM Multidisciplinary Human Rights, she conducted research for her master’s thesis on the viability of participatory-democratic global governance and innovative transnational decision-making procedures rooted in the Internet.
Apart from working at HBI, Josefa Francke was an associated researcher at the
Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin.