Amanda Lagerkvist

Amanda Lagerkvist is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies and a founder of existential media studies. Her work explores digital-human vulnerabilities in light of existential philosophy, focusing empirically on death online, digital memories, and on increased automation of human life and the Earth. She heads the BioMe project which explores existential and ethical challenges of biometric AI within the human lifeworld. Find out more: http://www.im.uu.se/research/hub-for-digtal-existence

Amanda Lagerkvist PhD., is a Senior Lecturer and Full Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University. She is a media phenomenologist and founder of existential media studies.

Professor Lagerkvist holds a PhD from Stockholm University in 2005. Her doctoral dissertation Amerikafantasier. Kön, medier och visualitet i svenska reseskildringar från USA 1945-63, is a cultural history of the media which places the relationship to the US - activated through physical encounters with the mediated nation - centrally for understanding Swedish postwar media history, and a phenomenological investigation into the intersections of space, lived experience, mediation and traveling.

Lagerkvist had a two-year postdoc at SU between 2005-2007. The project "City of the Future: Time, Mediation and Multisensuous Immersion in the Future City of Shanghai" was funded by the Foundation of Anna Ahlström and Ellen Terserus. She was Research Fellow (forskarassistent) at SINAS (The Swedish Institute for North American Studies) at Uppsala University between 2007-2010. Between 2010-2013 she was Lecturer in Media and Communication Studies at Södertörn University. She became an Associate Professor of MCS in 2010.

Professor Lagerkvist was appointed Wallenberg Academy Fellow in 2013 and between 2014-2018 she headed the research program ”Existential Terrains: Memory and Meaning in Cultures of Connectivity” (http://et.ims.su.se) at Stockholm University, funded by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation (KAW) and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation (MAW). The collaboration between KAW and the five Swedish academies within the Wallenberg Academy Fellows program, included a mentorship and leadership training program for ‘Research Leaders of the Future’.

Professor Lagerkvist is now heading the research program "BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds" (2020-2024) a project within WASP-HS, funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation: https://wasp-hs.org She is the PI of the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence: https://www.im.uu.se/forskning/uppsala-informatics-and-media-hub-for-digital-existence/

Lagerkvist is also a member of the FORMAS-funded project "The Mediated Planet: Claiming Data for Environmental SDGs" (2020-2025) headed by Dr. Sabine Höhler at KTH: https://www.kth.se/en/abe/inst/philhist/historia/forskning/higher-education-ins/the-mediated-planet-claiming-data-for-environmental-sdgs-1.1014650

Professor Lagerkvist was Visiting Scholar at King’s College, London for the academic year of 2018/19, invited by Professor Anna Reading, The Dept. of Culture, Media and Creative Industries. She was invited to lecture at the Oxford Internet Institute, the Digital Ethics Lab, headed by Professor Luciano Floridi, https://digitalethicslab.oii.ox.ac.uk/ (October 23, 2019).

Invited to speak at the Into the Air Symposium, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada (the 20th anniversary of the publication of John Durham Peters’ seminal book Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, she gave a talk about its reception in Sweden and role in the development of existential media theory.

Amanda Lagerkvist served on the Board and Screening Committee of the Fulbright Commission Sweden (January 2019-December 2020), and was Chair of the Board of the network ‘Digital Humanities Uppsala’ for two years (2019-2020). She is now serving in the Recruitment Group for Lectureships at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Uppsala University.

During her postdoc years Professor Lagerkvist developed an overarching socio-phenomenological approach to media and memory, exemplified in her monograph Media and Memory in New Shanghai: Western Performances of Futures Past (Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies, 2013). Professor Lagerkvist's current work and development of existential media studies (EMS) applies and updates classic phenomenological resources in the philosophy of existence to contemporary stakes of digital media and automated media technologies. The overarching aim of EMS is to explore what it means to be human in the digital age, in light of the fact that digital media are both ontologically 'the infrastructures of our being' (as John D. Peters puts it, 2015) and anthropological sites of the limit situations of human life where individuals and groups explore, tackle, and cope existentially (Jaspers 1932/1970). With a particular but not exclusive focus on death online, she developed a theoretical framework for existential media studies, focusing on digital-human vulnerabilities of online mourning, commemoration, and the digital afterlife. The Existential Terrains program which she headed between 2014-2018, made headway in contributing with an existential approach to digital culture in media studies, while simultaneously contributing to the two subfields death online and digital memory studies. The program was the first media studies project in the world that researched the existential dimensions of digitalization, both empirically and theoretically.

The Existential Terrains program also initiated the DIGMEX network, an interdisciplinary research network which is constituted by over 180 scholars from all over the world. DIGMEX members work in for example media and communication studies, media philosophy, software studies, the philosophy of technology, digital media ethics, internet research, cyber sociology, digital culture studies, feminist STS, media religion and culture and digital memory studies. The network organizes seminars, workshops on digital media ethics, a lecture series and has hosted two successful international conferences: ”Digital Existence: Memory, Meaning Vulnerability” October 2015 (http://et.ims.su.se/files/Program-Digital-Existence.pdf) and ”Digital Existence II: Precarious Media Life” October 2017 (http://et.ims.su.se/activities/#2017-11-01). The main outcome of the conference events is the anthology Digital Existence: Ontology, Ethics and Transcendence in Digital Culture (Ed. A. Lagerkvist, Routledge 2019), which introduces the field and has a foreword by John Durham Peters at Yale University.

Professor Lagerkvist is now taking existential media studies in new and urgent directions, by heading the research program "BioMe: Existential Challenges and Ethical Imperatives of Biometric AI in Everyday Lifeworlds" (2020-2024), a project within WASP-HS, funded by the Marianne and Marcus Wallenberg Foundation and the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation: https://wasp-hs.org She is the PI of the Uppsala Informatics and Media Hub for Digital Existence: https://www.im.uu.se/forskning/uppsala-informatics-and-media-hub-for-digital-existence/

Lagerkvist is also a member of the FORMAS-funded project "The Mediated Planet: Claiming Data for Environmental SDGs" (2020-2025) headed by Dr. Sabine Höhler at KTH: https://www.kth.se/en/abe/inst/philhist/historia/forskning/higher-education-ins/the-mediated-planet-claiming-data-for-environmental-sdgs-1.1014650

Lagerkvist is currently working on a monograph entitled Existential Media (contracted with Oxford University Press) provides for an empirically founded and theoretically original perspective on digital technologies as both resource and risk. It submits that our lives are increasingly digitally “thrown” (to borrow the language of Martin Heidegger and Søren Kierkegaard before him) into a highly connected, fast changing, increasingly automated and quantifying world that threatens to leave us displaced and vulnerable, but also with the fundamental task to navigate these new terrains and make them meaningful.

Lagerkvist’s work has also appeared in for example New Media & Society, Feminist Media Studies, The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, Journal of Digital Social Research, Thanatos, Television & New Media, The Sociological Review, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, European Journal of Communication, Journal of Visual Culture, Senses and Society, and Space & Culture. She has also contributed to the collections Digital Memory Studies: Media Pasts in Transition (Ed. A. Hoskins, Routledge 2017) and to A Networked Self and Birth, Life, Death (Ed. Z. Papacharissi, Routledge 2018) and the forthcoming anthologies Digital Religion 2.0 (edited by Heidi Campbell and Ruth Tsuria, Routledge) and The Oxford Handbook of Digital Religion (Oxford University Press, edited by Heidi Campbell and Pauline Cheong ). She is also the author of the monograph Media and Memory in New Shanghai: Western Performances of Futures Past (Palgrave Macmillan 2013); the co-editor of Strange Spaces: Explorations into Mediated Obscurity (with A. Jansson, Ashgate 2009) and the editor of Digital Existence (2019) (see above).