[spectre] ACS Virtual Lecture Series talk, June 24: Lindsay Balfour – Intimacy, Haunting, and the Digital Future of Hospitality

[Gary Hall]

My Centre for Postdigital Cultures colleague Lindsay Balfour will be
giving this talk later in the month.

The Association for Cultural Studies
<http://www.cultstud.org/wordpress/> (ACS) welcomes you to an upcoming
talk in its *Virtual Lecture Series*, by *Lindsay Balfour (Coventry
University, UK),* titled *‘Intimacy, Haunting, and the Digital Future of
Hospitality’* (followed by a Q&A), which will take place on *June 24th,
5:30 PM BST/ British Summer Time (GMT +1)* (more information underneath).

For more information on the Virtual Lecture Series and upcoming talks,
please visit:https://www.cultstud.org/wordpress/virtual-lecture-series/

*Lindsay Balfour (Coventry University, UK) – Intimacy, Haunting, and the
Digital Future of Hospitality*
*June 24th, 2024*
*5:30 PM BST/ British Summer Time (GMT +1)*

*Abstract:* In October 2020, the online dating platform /Tinder/
released their campaign, “It’s Your Boo,” a tongue in cheek reference to
a disturbing trend, where those who were guilty of “ghosting”
prospective online-dating partners were given opportunity to reach out
to those they abruptly disregarded months or years ago. Postdigital life
remains haunted by promised and failed forms of intimacy with strangers
and /Tinder/’s attempts to bring such ghosts back from the dead speaks
to a deep preoccupation with strange and uncanny intimacies, and a
reality of living with others, whether human or more-than-human, virtual
or material. This talk works through the relationship between haunting,
intimacy, and technology in a world where the digital future is very
much a source of both relational anxiety and relational opportunity.
Digital ghosts, of course, also conjure a kind of intimacy that is
immaterial and unseen, reminding us of the forms of risky intimacy
engendered by the spectres of contagion, parasitism, dust, and airborne
strangers. The talk thus concludes with a move towards intimacy and the
autoimmune – represented in the digital age by the figure of the
computer virus but now also with other significant cultural meanings,
especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Undoubtedly, thinking
about postdigital intimacies through the concept of spectral strangers
offers a new avenue for exploring the implications of virtual
technologies on our ethical, social, and cultural life, as well as
providing a new way to think the problem of intimacy itself.

*Bio: Dr Lindsay Balfour* is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the
Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) at Coventry University. Her
research draws on the philosophical concept of hospitality to consider
the relationship between humans and technology, and employs an
intersectional feminist and cultural studies perspective to look at
digital intimacies. Currently, she is conducting feminist analyses of
intimate surveillance and embodied computing including the concept of
“tracking” through wearables, implantables, and ingestibles. She is a
member of the Postdigital Intimacies Research Network, the author of
/Hospitality in a Time of Terror/ (Bucknell UP, 2017), as well as /The
Digital Future of Hospitality/ and /FemTech: Intersectional
Interventions in Women’s Digital Health/, both published in 2023, and
many other articles and book chapters. Lindsay’s recent projects include
working with cross-sector stakeholders to develop interventions for
technologically-facilitated gender-based violence, funded by ESRC Impact
Acceleration grants.


*To register for this free event, please email:*vls at cultstud.org

Please note that email registration is an automated process. If you do
NOT receive a reply to your email with the relevant information within
an hour, please check your spam folder, as some ISPs will treat this
automated reply as spam. If the automated VLS message is not in your
spam folder, please emailinfo at cultstud.org for more personal assistance.

*Privacy notice:*We will use the address you email from to send you an
invitation to the talk. The personal details (email address) of those
registered are kept for the purpose of event registration only and will
not be used for any other purposes. The records will be kept for one
month after the registration.

The ACS is the Data Controller of the records collected and is committed
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Legislation. Please submit any data subject rights requests or address
any complaints or suspected breaches toinfo at cultstud.org


--
Gary Hall
Professor of Media
Director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University:
https://postdigitalcultures.org/about/

Website:http://www.garyhall.info
Follow on Mastodon here: @garyhall at hcommons.social

Latest:

Blog posts: 'A Brief History of Writing: From Human Meaning to Pattern Recognition and Beyond', with Joanna Zylinska, The Writing Platform:https://thewritingplatform.com/2024/05/a-brief-history-of-writing-from-human-meaning-to-computational-pattern-recognition-and-beyond/

'Creative AI: Thinking Outside the Black Box', Media Theory:https://mediatheoryjournal.org/2024/05/24/gary-hall-creative-ai-thinking-outside-the-black-box/

Interview: (open access) ‘How To Be A Pirate: An Interview with Alexandra Elbakyan and Gary Hall by Holger Briel’:https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/pb-assets/OA%20chapters/Briel_9781802076622_ch5_OA-1687267442.pdf

















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