ICCIT Annual Lecture 2026: Amanda Lagerkvist

Join us for the 2026 ICCIT Annual Lecture, featuring Professor Amanda Lagerkvist (Uppsala University, Sweden): AI as Existential Media: Refiguring Human–Technology Relationality at 'the End Times'.

In a moment of interrelated crises, advanced technologies that we call “AI” (artificial intelligence) have hijacked the future itself. Offering prophecies of both doom and salvation, these technologies are simultaneously hailed as the inevitable solution to all of humanity’s problems. This lecture offers a refiguration of “AI” through the lens of existential media studies and some of its key concepts, frameworks and themes. I will show how, in what I call the ‘digital limit situation’ (Lagerkvist 2020, 2022) of Krisis and potentially Kairos, the technology is entrusted to be salvaging humanity and feared to render us extinct, spurring new investments. I will then zoom in on “the human self,” which seems to be encroached from all sides, as new “subjects” are meanwhile envisioned to be born inside the models. This raises a series of pressing questions as humans are in deep relationality with media technologies: What norms for being human in the world do advanced technologies bring about, challenge or reactivate? And how can we, beyond the apocalyptic AI imaginary, envision our selves and technologies relationally as well as within limits, for promoting an existentially sustainable future with machines?

About the speaker:

Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of media and communication studies, PI of the Uppsala Hub for Digital Existence ; guest researcher at the Centre for Multidisciplinary Research on Religion and Society (CRS) at Uppsala University and Core Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, The University of Helsinki (2025-2026). As Wallenberg Academy Fellow (2014-2018) she founded the field of existential media studies. Her work has spanned the existential dimensions of digital memories, death online and lifeworlds of biometrics. She currently explores intersections of datafication, disability and selfhood; and the ambivalent AI imaginary and its relationship to both futures and endings. In her monograph Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (OUP, 2022) she introduces Karl Jaspers’ existential philosophy for media theory. She is the co-editor of Relational Technologies: In Search of the Self Across Datafied Lifeworlds with Dr. Jacek Smolicki (Bloomsbury) and she is currently under contract for her new monograph Dismedia: Technologies of the Extraordinary Self with The University of Michigan Press.

About the ICCIT Annual Lecture:
The ICCIT Annual Lecture is organized by the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology, at the University of Toronto Mississauga. ICCIT researches the relationship between humans and technology and is a communication and media department for the 21st Century.
The ICCIT Annual Lecture features invited scholars who bring different theoretical orientations, philosophies, and methodologies to human-technology problems.
Time and Location:
Friday April 24, 2026, from 2:00 to 4pm, with reception to follow.
University of Toronto Mississauga, Collaborative Digital Research Space (CDRS), located in Maanjiwe nendamowinan (room MN3230).

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher ICCIT, University of Toronto Mississauga