Global Digital Intimacies

Digitization is transforming intimate practices around the globe. The expansive reach of digital connectivity is reorganizing public/private, global/local boundaries, and pushing beyond dominant Western understandings of intimacy. Digital platforms and mobile apps—Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, WeChat, WhatsApp, Tinder, Tantan, Blued, and Chaturbate—have rapidly become central to intimacy. These platforms and apps enable and allow for the traveling of new forms of self-expression and identity construction, including LGTBQAI+ cultures and identifications across the globe, as well as new types of social connections and attachments. Such connections interact in complex ways with conventional understandings of sex, love and desire, as well as of friendship, kinship, community, nationhood, partnership and collegiality.

While the digital is becoming intricately entangled with every social activity, these platforms and apps are characterized by distinct material characteristics within technological, geopolitical contexts. Economically speaking, social networks, live streaming platforms, and chat and dating apps constitute markets, connecting end-users, content producers, advertisers, data intermediaries, venture capitalists, and other third parties. Powered by large-scale infrastructures, they bring about the datafication and commodification of intimacy. Simultaneously, these techno-commercial assemblages cannot be separated from the affective exchanges and emotional experiences that constitute the immaterial content of digital interactions and relations.

In the light of these transformations, the Global Digital Intimacies conference aims to gather together scholars from around the world to investigate digital intimacy in all its varieties. We understand digital intimacy as affect, labor, a form of being, and structure of feeling. It takes shape through the digital, but is deeply material. It includes love, sex, and sexuality, but also wider sets of relations. Intimacy is conceived as a function that brings together humans and non-humans, shaping communities and identities. As Lauren Berlant (1998, 281) argued, it "involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way". Intimacy is a political experience, transcending the public and the private. Intimacy, as a structure of feeling, can bring social movements together, it can feed into fantasies about a better life, but can also propel conservative nostalgic and nationalistic discourses. What are the political implications of digital intimacies, and how are different forms of governance trying to steer or control these politics?

Intimacy holds different meanings and takes various forms across the globe, and thus, in the spirit of decolonial and postcolonial thinking, we encourage participants to reflect and develop alternative interpretations of intimacy, and to avoid universalizing Western-centric understandings of intimacy in their papers. Similarly, digital technologies are used and imagined differently based on historical, cultural, and political contexts. Accordingly, we urge participants to steer clear of both techno-deterministic and cultural essentialist rhetorics, grounding their research in specific localities, but remaining attuned to global entanglements. The conference is explicitly interdisciplinary, bringing together media studies scholars, sociologists, communication researchers, information scientists, anthropologists, philosophers, economists, and legal scholars, among others. The digitization of intimacy requires interdisciplinary collaboration to address the hard questions triggered by this development.

Keynote Speakers:
Apryl Williams, Audrey Yue, Mona Abdel-Fadil, Katrin Tiidenberg and Patrick Keilty

Registration fees (includes conference dinner & closing drinks):

• OECD countries, faculty & postdocs: 100 Euro
• OECD countries, PhD students: 50 Euro
• OECD countries, affiliates of NGOs and non-academic research institutes: 100 Euro
• Non-OECD countries, affiliates of NGOs and non-academic research institutes: 50 Euro
• Non-OECD countries, faculty & postdocs: 50 Euro
• Non-OECD countries, PhD students: 25 Euro
• Online (Zoom): 25 Euro

Host or Publisher Global Digital Cultures