Séminaire ABBA - LAMC : Owen McNamara « Populism and Madrid Tenant’s Union » et Mariia Erofeeva « The Digital Lifeworld: An Anthropological Investigation of Immersive Virtual Reality »

 
Mariia Erofeeva

Title: The Digital Lifeworld: An Anthropological Investigation of Immersive Virtual Reality

Bio: Mariia Erofeeva is a social scientist interested in how technologies mediate human action. Currently she is doing postdoctoral research at LAMC in the framework of the "Digital Immersions" project led by prof. David Berliner. In this project she investigates the experiences of metaverse inhabitants, focusing on how they draw the line between the "meatworld" and virtual reality.

Abstract: We will discuss why various online experiences feel similar or different to each other and to face-to-face situation. Drawing on Alfred Schutz’s phenomenological sociology, I analyze the relationship between everyday life and the virtual domain. On the theoretical level, I emphasize the role of spatiality and embodiment in structuring virtual sociality. Building on the concept of virtual life-worlds, on the empirical level, I focus on a specific digital environment that uses virtual reality (VR) technologies. Ethnographic research in VRChat, a social VR platform, illustrates how avatar-body attachment and the platform’s asymmetry—allowing varying modes of presence—fosters a continuity between VR and real-life experiences through the duplication of bodily expressive resources and the quest for realism. At the same time, VR also enables the technical purification of self-expression, creating a uniquely mediated social experience. I invite a broader discussion on the topics of technological mediation and embodiment, and their connection to identity.

Owen McNamara

Title: Domestic Populism

Bio: Owen McNamara is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions fellowship holder working with the Université Libre de Bruxelles. He is a political and environmental anthropologist, with a particular interest in populism and the politics of habitability. In his current project, Owen is exploring experiences of housing conflict in Spain.

Abstract: In this presentation I discuss research that I have been undertaking with the Sindicato de Inquilinas de Madrid, a tenants’ rights union that is responding to Spain’s housing crisis. Despite the group having no pretensions to state power, I argue that the group is nonetheless ideologically populist. In this talk I focus on the personalisation of the housing crisis, exploring how tenants active with the union frame their conflicts as at once structural failings of the state to protect against capitalism’s rapaciousness and at the same time as interpersonal disputes with specific, nameable individuals.

Lieu : ULB - Campus Solbosch, Institut de Sociologie (Bâtiment S), Salle Doucy S12.123 - 12e niveau, Rue Jeanne, 44, 1050 - Bruxelles