Call for Papers:

Immersive Media in/of Crisis
A conference organized by the VR as Empathy Machine research group at Utrecht University (Professor Sandra Ponzanesi, Dr. Jenny Andrine Madsen Evang, Laurence Herfs, Lisa Burghardt, and Dr. Wouter Oomen)
May 24-26, 2027
Utrecht, Netherlands
https://vrmigration.sites.uu.nl/news-and-events/

Deadline for submissions: January 15, 2027

Immersive Media in/of Crisis will bring together interdisciplinary scholars to explore the various intersections between immersive media and crisis, ten years after the much-heralded framing of Virtual Reality (VR) as the “Ultimate Empathy Machine.” We invite contributions that thematize the notion of crisis across multiple valences—from delineating the imaginaries of immersive media as the ultimate apparatus for bringing “crisis” up close, to critiquing the spectacularizing temporality of crisis shown in immersive media, to analyzing the emerging discourse of immersive media as itself a technology in crisis (financial, symbolic, distribution-wise, or political). We are especially eager for presentations that engage with post- or decolonial critique, queer theory, critical race theory, environmental studies, or feminist theory to analyze immersive art or media that destabilize hegemonic mediations of crises—for example, by staying with the trouble of slow violence in the wake of colonialism.

The conference will ask: What is the price of this ameliorative imaginary of immersive media as benign humanitarian tools that promise to “solve” crises through individual affect in the present? In the wake of such grand narratives, many critics have problematized the utopian celebrations of the immersive medium—Lisa Nakamura, for example, analyzes the fantasy of VR as “toxic re-embodiment,” where the Western self gets to “occupy the body of an other who might not even own their own body” in order to take pleasure in crisis (2020, 52). Riffing on Wendy Chun’s speech at the Weird Reality conference, Robert Yang deconstructs the seemingly virtuous morality of VR as a “refugee tourism simulator,” writing that “if you walk in someone else’s shoes, then you’ve taken their shoes. If you won’t believe someone’s pain unless they wrap an expensive 360 video around you, then perhaps you don’t actually care about their pain” (2017). Other critics have similarly criticized the “techno-magical” (Hassan 2019) framings of VR by pointing out how the blissful overdetermination of the medium’s cutting-edge abilities in fact obscures the continuities between the medium’s appropriation of racialized experiences and the longer lineages of objectification, spectacularization, and homogenization that underlie current temporalities of crisis.

This conference brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds, aiming to examine imaginaries of immersive media and the politics of crisis. More specifically, we seek to:

• Interrogate immersive media beyond the empathy machine: If we don’t want the “empathy machine” of humanitarian organizations married to the tech industry to be the dominant mediator of crisis, then what do we want immersive media to (un)do?
• Think about the notion of crisis: What are the crises addressed through immersive media? Humanitarian crises, war and conflict, sustainability and climate crises, health and pandemic crises? Natural disasters and nuclear threats? How are these crises framed and mediated?
• Think about the crisis of technology: How can we approach the current state of crisis in which immersive media finds itself in relation to how immersive media mediates various crises while erasing others?
• What is the role of the Human in these new technological constellations? Virtual reality promises the collapse of time and space and the embrace of «the Other.» How do immersive technologies rethink the role of the human and of common humanity in conditions of crisis?
• We hope to foster interdisciplinary dialogue by showing how different approaches, genres, and media formats allow us to rethink immersion in our contemporary times and help us address crises and their possible undoing.

We invite abstracts related, but not limited, to the themes below:

• Immersion and slow violence
• Racial innocence and the myopia of crisis in immersive media
• Technologies of corporality and crisis
• Imaginaries of compassion fatigue as a crisis
• Coloniality and its temporalities in immersive media
• The alleged “crisis of care” in relation to immersion
• Aesthetics of solidarity and virtual witnessing beyond empathy
• Virtual memory and crisis: personal, collective, prosthetic remembrances
• The politics of witnessing across virtual times
• Immersive figuration of the Human in relation to temporalities of crises
• Deep time and the planetary imagination in VR
• Global locations and local virtualities from postcolonial perspectives
• Immersivity and depoliticization of crisis
• Immersive viscerality and haptic crisis
• Escapism and embeddedness in immersive geographies
• “Fourth VR” and decolonial collaborations
• Indigenous, diasporic, and transnational virtualities across immersive media
• Theoretical critiques of the notion of crisis
• Comparative approaches to VR, XR, AR, and immersion in relation to crisis
• Disenchanting immersive media’s rhetoric of charity, compassion, and/or care
• Immersive art beyond the NGO-industrial complex
• Immersive media as third space: publics, communities, encounters in times of crisis
• Artists within and against corporate tech platforms in an age of technological crisis

We welcome contributions by January 15th, 2027 to [email protected] in the following submission formats:

• Individual academic papers
  • Include a 300-word abstract and a 150-word individual bio.
• Panel submissions
  • Include a general title, a short summary of the overall panel theme (max. 500 words), 3–4 individual abstracts (max. 300 words each), and 150-word individual bios.
• Workshops and other interactive formats
  • Include a general title, a short summary of the overall discussion/workshop (max. 500 words), and 150-word individual bio(s) of the workshop facilitator(s).
• Artistic interventions (i.e., readings, performances, screenings)
  • Include a 300-word abstract that describes the planned artistic intervention and a 150-word bio.

Practical details:

• The conference will take place in Utrecht from May 24th to 26th, 2027, and will consist of panels with three or four 15-minute talks followed by a collective Q&A as well as keynote lectures and workshops. Based on accepted submissions, we will organize the panels around central themes and approaches.
• Deadline for submission: January 15th, 2027