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This conversation departs from the authors' studies, which examine the various ways authorities use technologies in identification processes. Drawing on empirical work with young asylum seekers undergoing medical age assessments in Sweden after 2017, Matilda Tudor will discuss the over-reliance on bodily data in contemporary migration systems. What does it mean to understand the singular human being, in general, and the temporal self, in particular, as a hyper-empirical medical unit? What types of ethical concerns do such procedures raise? Exploring how identification technologies have intertwined the notion of identity with practices of identification, Mahmoud Keshavarz will argue for the necessity of disentangling these two aspects by multiplying the ways individuals identify themselves in relation to collectives. Pedro Oliveira will focus on the relationship between voice and identity and how its reoccurrences in the developments of machine listening come to matter in border crossing and asylum cases today. Speaking from a position an artist, he will share his thoughts on how voice can refuse to announce the body.

This article analyses the discursive power of the datafied body, using the example of medical age assessments on unaccompanied minors in Sweden from 2017. Focusing on mainstream media discourses, it aims to raise critical attention to the truth-effect of body data, and the impact of media discourse on how it is transmitted to the broader public. This becomes particularly striking in relation to a case where such data were being miscalculated and misused, in a human rights scandal Sweden has yet to deal with. Ultimately, I argue that this machinery, while turning bodies into data, carries the logic of a lie detector of sorts, wiping out self-attesting truth, and undermining relationality and trust. Through the articulation and amplification of such logics, media discourse helped confirm and legitimise the power abuse of a nation state towards a particularly vulnerable group in search of protection. Hence, I maintain that the overreliance on body data in the current migration regime must be critically discussed in relation to ethical sensibilities and the growing dehumanisation of displaced populations.

This article discusses the key existential stakes of implementing biometrics in human lifeworlds. In this pursuit, we offer a problematization and reinvention of central values often taken for granted within the “ethical turn” of AI development and discourse, such as autonomy, agency, privacy and integrity, as we revisit basic questions about what it means to be human and embodied. Within a framework of existential media studies, we introduce an existential ethics of care—through a conversation between existentialism, virtue ethics, a feminist ethics of care and post-humanist ethics—aiming to deepen and nuance our understanding of the human behind “human-centered” AI directives. The key argument is that biometrics implicates humans through unprecedented forms of objectification, through which the existential body—the relational, intimate and frail human being—is at risk. We interrogate these risks as they become visible at three sites where embodied humans are challenged by biometrics, and thus where the existential body is challenged by the biometric body. This occurs through reductionism (biometric passports nailing bodies to identities, removing human judgment and compromising agency at the AI border), enforced transparency (smart home assistants surveying human intimacies and invading intimate spaces in the bedroom) and the breaching of bodily integrity (chipping bodies to capture sensory data, challenging the very concept of bodily integrity through self-invasive biohacking). Our existential ethics of care is importantly not a solutionist list of principles or suggestions, but a manifesto for a way of thinking about the ethical challenges of living with biometrics in today’s world, by raising the right questions. We argue that a revitalized discussion of the basic existential stakes within human lived experience is needed and should serve as the foundation on which comprehensive frameworks can be built to address the complexities and prospects for ethical machines, responsible biometrics and AI.

How are we to understand the politics of location in our “hyper-space-biased” time of digital existence? This article revisits the debate on media and spatiality through the lens of critical phenomenology and argues for the need to recognize multiple forms of embodiment in mediaspace. With support from a case study on queer digital media use in Russia, it takes the socially circumscribed subject as its strategic starting point for understanding digital media space. By doing so, it argues that often referred to as tropes of a “seamless medialife” are not only simplifying things, but can easily become normative. In digital existence, some bodies and mobilities are quite literally stopped, and we cannot conflate how flesh travels and occupies space with how we might occupy and travel in code. In order to develop my argument, I will put media phenomenology in dialogue with queer phenomenology, but also hint at how we may take our cue from the field of existential media studies to further this debate on vulnerabilities and technology.

Judging by their voices, smart home assistants are white, servile women. And historically, white femininity has represented the sonorous surfaces of automatons. As an exercise in existential media studies, this chapter sounds out how the biased backend reduces what it means to be human—and renegotiates “humanness”—through a specific gender politics in the realm of technological innovation. Engaging ideas about vocality as the center of our political and existential selves, the authors explore what happens when the essentially multivalent “voice” becomes entangled with technological assemblages of power, techno-utopianism, and patriarchal values. By alluding to femininity—the quintessential “Other” of the real human—our ever smarter and more autonomous home technologies are equally rendered harmless, reflecting back to Man his unthreatened position.

This article asks what it means to habituate a queer orientation in a world permeated by digital connectivity. In doing so, it takes media phenomenology away from the mundane towards the momentous, drawing on queer phenomenology, and existential media studies. Using life-narrative interviews with sexual minorities in Russia, the article sheds light on the “work of queer habituation” in a straight world, and the contemporary significance of digital media technologies within this process. Digital media’s ability to multiply space is defined a key feature which offers sites to “stay with” the disorienting experience of queer dispositions. Through longer periods of discrete “queer digital dwelling,” individuals who have been associating their queer desires with ontological threats are able to find space for existence and existential security. By locating others in close proximity, some are also allowed to appropriate local territory in ways that make it more livable.

How we conceptualize the relationship between media and space has implications for how we conceive of citizen media. Media may be regarded either as an enabling infrastructure that connects disenfranchised individuals and disparate locations, or as fundamentally interconnected with how we experience and negotiate locality. Media is also commonly understood to produce spaces in its own right, providing alternative geographies for action. Despite their centrality in contemporary media studies, space and place remain difficult to grasp as concepts, however, and continue to evoke discussion relating to the ontological status of the digitally connected human subject. This entry will therefore begin by outlining key debates that emerged in the late twentieth century and reveal the anxieties as well as wishful thinking characteristic of this period in relation to electronic and digital media’s ability to overthrow geography and enable disembodiment. It then looks more closely at what has increasingly been referred to as the ‘spatial turn’ in media studies. Addressing the materiality of everyday life, new perspectives focus more on how media interact with physical conditions and limitations, and stress the need to examine these issues from a grounded standpoint. Instead of leading to the end of geography, new flows and connections across the social and geographical dimensions are understood to ‘rearrange’ space and place, revealing previously unexamined spatial complexities. The entry will conclude with a discussion of findings from ethnographic work conducted among queer media users in contemporary Russia that examined their everyday movements and perceptions of space. It will draw on the work of media phenomenologists in order to capture the mundane entanglement of media in everyday experience and will argue for the importance of recognizing a multiply situated media user in order to grasp the complexities of contemporary social existence.

This dissertation explores ways in which “queer digital media use” co-produces senses of space, time, and queer being in contemporary Russia. Considering the particular implications of (in)visibility for queer living, and the importance of compartmentalizing conflicting spheres, the study provides a grounded account of queer life lived with and through digital media in a context currently characterized by “anti-gay” sentiments. Empirically, it draws on fieldwork and in-depth interviews with queer male informants in Saint Petersburg from 2013–2015 in accordance with a “non-digital-centric” digital ethnography. Taking a distinct phenomenological perspective, the study asks how digital media is implicated within the informants’ queer orientation towards the world. How does digital media affect perceptions of the here and now, the proximate and the distant, and spaces of belonging? In what way is it entwined with the directions they take and how they perceive of the future? And how do the different mobilities of flesh and code relate to one another? Aiming to answer such questions, the study outlines a “queer digital media phenomenology”, combining Sara Ahmed’s queer phenomenology and Shaun Moores’s media phenomenology. While Ahmed provides a deep understanding of queer habituation, Moores adds a consideration of the multiply positioned digital media user, as a fundamental pre-requisite for contemporary social experience. Rather than echoing commonly accepted ideas of speedup and instantaneousness within digital culture, the results show that digital media is often used among the informants to help produce slowness and to postpone further action. By producing spaces understood as “safe” and private, digital media provides sites where the work of generating a queer orientation can be done, and where the larger geography of everyday living may be negotiated. The study thus explores how the informants travel across multiple sites, particularly articulating the dynamics between online and offline spaces, and the discontinuities of queer digital media use. Challenging the idea of constant connectivity and an online/offline collapse, the dissertation follows recent studies in suggesting that digital media use exposes unorthodox ways of imagining relationality, why we need to critically consider inbuilt normative assumptions about the embodied subjects anticipated to live “seamless medialives”.

I denna avhandling utforskas hur “queert digitalt mediebruk” samproducerar uppfattningar om tid, rum och queert varande i det samtida Ryssland. Med hänsyn till de särskilda implikationer som (o)synlighet har för queera individer, samt vikten av att hålla isär sfärer som står i konflikt med varandra, ämnar den att bidra med en kontextualiserad beskrivning av hur queert liv levs med och genom digitala medier, i en miljö präglad av ökad homofobi. Empiriskt baseras studien på fältarbete och djupintervjuer med queera män i Sankt Petersburg från 2013–2015, i enlighet med en ”non-digital-centric” digital etnografi. Genom att anlägga ett distinkt fenomenologiskt perspektiv, avser studien besvara frågor om hur digitala medier hör samman med informanternas queera orientering i världen. Hur påverkar digitala medier uppfattningar av det som är avlägset och nära, och var de tänker sig höra hemma? På vilka sätt är digitala medier sammanflätade med informanternas riktning framåt och hur de förnimmer sin framtid? Och hur kan vi förstå samspelet mellan kroppars och digitala koders olika rörelseförmåga? För att besvara sådana frågor sätter studien samman en ”queer digital mediefenomenologi”, genom att kombinera Sara Ahmeds queera fenomenologi med Shaun Moores mediefenomenologi. Medan Ahmed erbjuder en djupare förståelse för queer habituering understryker Moores att en fundamental utgångspunkt för att förstå samtida sociala erfarenheter är att den digitala medieanvändaren är mångfaldigt positionerad i flera rum samtidigt. Medan digital kultur vanligen sammankopplas med ökat tempo visar resultaten att informanterna ofta använder digitala medier för att sakta ner farten och skjuta upp vidare handling. Digitala medier genererar rum som uppfattas som ”säkra” och/eller privata där det ”arbete” som krävs för att utveckla en queer orientering kan göras, och där vardagslivets övergripande geografi kan förhandlas. Studien utforskar därmed hur informanterna rör sig mellan olika rum och betonar särskilt dynamiken mellan platser online och offline för att fånga diskontinuiteten i queert digitalt mediebruk. Därmed vill avhandlingen utmana idéer om konstant konnektivitet och en online/offline-kollaps, och i likhet med samtida röster peka på att digitalt mediebruk visar på okonventionella sätt att föreställa sig det relationella, varför vi kritiskt behöver granska normativa utgångspunkter gällande de kroppsliga subjekt som antas leva ”sömlösa medieliv”.

This article is based on the essay »When boys want to play with boys« which analyses hegemonic masculinity in conversation with three course leaders at different »male-courses«. The article aims to discuss the leaders' relationship to different masculinities, and to pay special attention to the importance of sexuality in their constructions of masculinity. It takes into account research about the profeminist- and the mythopoetic men's movement. Theories used to framework the analysis are mainly R.W. Connell's studies and her concept of hegemonic masculinity, instrategic coalition with Judith Butler's queer theories. The purpose is to further emphasize the connection between gender and sexuality. The article shows that the ideologies not based on an analysis of societal power relations, tend to formulate themselves in contradistinction to subordinated and marginalized masculinities as well as women. A central point is that the particular male-course homosociality between men in Sweden often depend on an obligatory heterosexuality, since itis still being connected to the stereotype of the »velourman«, which was used to stigmatize the profeminist men's movement in the 1970's.