Lisa Burghardt is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht 木瓜福利影视 and part of the NWO funded project "Virtual Reality as Empathy Machine: Media, Migration and the Humanitarian Predicament".
VR has often been promoted as an 鈥渆mpathy machine,鈥� but rather than asking whether VR generates empathy, my research aims to understand how it mediates relationships, ethico-political tensions, and emotions in concrete contexts. My research traces how different actors鈥攕uch as creators, curators, and audiences鈥攑ractice care through and around VR, and how these practices are shaped by both human and material agencies. I take an ethnographic approach to explore how VR is embedded in social practices, focusing in particular on the role of affect and care.
By bringing together insights from feminist Science and Technology Studies and feminist theories of care and emotions, I aim to rethink humanitarian VR. Through this, my work contributes to broader conversations about media, technology, and emotions.