Dismedia: toward consolidating existential media studies and crip theory for troubled times
Amanda Lagerkvist, Professor of media and communication studies, at Uppsala University
This talk is a collaboration between the higher seminar in media and communication studies and Humlab.
This presentation focuses on the main theoretical framework of a book project in progress named Dismedia: Technologies of the Extraordinary Self (under contract with the University of Michigan Press). The book seeks to lay new media-philosophical foundations on which to rethink and rewrite the entanglements of disability, datafication, and selfhood. By recalling and furthering the concept of dismediation, which describes the co-constitution of bodies and technology in media history (Mills and Sterne 2017), it offers a critique of long-simmering ableist assumptions about a “defective humanity” in need of normative rehabilitations and eugenic enhancement through technology. Broadening out from seminal approaches in critical disability studies on extraordinary bodies (Garland-Thomson 1997), I argue that through the prism of the extraordinary self we may identify, critically interrogate, rewrite and thus “crip” the techno-logics of hegemonic automation. The talk will provide brief case studies of “technologies of the extraordinary self” (cf. Foucault 1982) of biometric palm recognition, NLP models, and widely used video-sharing platforms. In order to further seminal work in disability media studies to critically examine how (digital) media may both enable and disable and produce dis/ability in the process, it suggests a coalition between crip theory (which bothers normative ideas about technological fixes) and existential media studies (Lagerkvist 2022) (which examines the at the intersections of originary technicity and shared vulnerability of a life within limits). The ultimate aim is to challenge the powerful techno-messianic hypes around AI and advanced technologies in today’s troubled world, by daring to offer world-making alternatives that contain a future for crips.
Bio
Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of media and communication studies, PI of the Uppsala Hub for Digital Existence and researcher at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society (CRS) at Uppsala University. As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014-2018) she founded the field of existential media studies. Her work has spanned the existential dimensions of digital memories, death online and lifeworlds of biometrics. She currently explores intersections of datafication, disability and selfhood; and the ambivalent AI imaginary and its relationship to both futures and endings. In her monograph, Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (OUP, 2022) she introduces Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy of limit situations for media theory. She is currently under contract for her new book Dismedia: Technologies of the Extraordinary Self with The University of Michigan Press.
