Josefa Francke

Josefa Francke is a junior researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Media Research | Hans Bredow Institute (HBI) in the research programme “Regulatory Structures and the Emergence of Rules in Online Spaces”.

She is an associated researcher at the Humboldt-Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG) and part of the research group “Global Constitutionalism and the Internet”. Her research focus lies on participative-democratic social structures and human rights globally and in the digital space. Josefa Francke is currently working on the project “Platform://Democracy – Global Best Practice Models for the Democratic Design of Hybrid Online Orders” and is investigating 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.

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 is conducting research for her master’s thesis on the viability of participatory-democratic global governance and innovative transnational decision-making
procedures rooted in the Internet.