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PhD Defence Helle Breth Klausen: Touching from a Distance’ – Conceptualizing the Intimate, Affective and Para-Haptic Potentials of Technologically-Mediated ASMR

Info about event

Time

Monday 22 August 2022,  at 13:00 - 16:00

Location

Peter Bøgh Auditorium, Finlandsgade 21, 8200 Aarhus N

Assessment committee:

  • Professor Susanna Paasonen, University of Turku, Finland
  • Professor Nicolai Jørgensgaard Graakjær, Aalborg University
  • Associate Professor Mathias Bonde Korsgaard, Aarhus University (chair)

 Main supervisor:

  • Associate Professor Iben Have, Department of Culture and Communication, Aarhus University

Co-supervisors:

Professor MSO Annette Markham, Aarhus University      

The defence will be conducted by Associate Professor Pia Majbritt Jensen

The defence is public, and everybody is welcome. The defence, scheduled for a maximum of three hours, will be held in English

The dissertation will be available to borrow for reading before the defence in a digital version. Please contact Helle Breth Klausen by email hbk@cc.au.dk in this respect before 19 August 2022 at 12:00 CET.

 

Abstract:

The dissertation “‘Touching from a distance’ – Conceptualizing the intimate, affective and para-haptic potentials of technologically-mediated ASMR” is one of the first and biggest projects to take on the task of introducing, categorizing and discussing ASMR in a conceptual way. ASMR, short for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, is the name of a multisensory physiological reaction often referred to as ‘tingles. Within the last decade, ASMR has mostly been associated with a genre of triggering videos including whimsical aesthetics on primarily YouTube, allowing viewer-listeners to experience tingles ‘on-demand’. This PhD project is a qualitative, small-scale study providing in-depth textual analyses of illustrative ASMR videos in order to make some wide-ranging reflections on the ways that technologically-mediated ASMR is potentially able to ‘touch us from a distance’. The central argument of the dissertation is thus that although the assemblage of technology that enables ASMR videos in some cases might distort the tingly, affective experience, the layers of mediation will in other cases serve to magnify and enhance the experience and make possible media-enabled perceptual and somatic levels of experience – levels that would not have been reached without technology.

 

Reception afterwards in Nygaard 5335, room 229 (frokoststuen).