Lisa Burghardt is a PhD candidate in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University and part of the NWO funded project Virtual Reality as Empathy Machine: Media, Migration and the Humanitarian Predicament. Within the project, she conducts research on how we can assess the experience of audiences being immersed in VR installations around topics of migration. She will be looking at the emotional responses this has on audiences, how this impacts their engagements with the topic and their moral responses to the VR experience. Through these insights she hopes to better understand the potentials and pitfalls of VR and how it might allow to bridge between distant others. Further, she aims to draw broader conclusions regarding the relation between technological mediations and emotions. The research is approached through a post-phenomenological, postcolonial and intersectional perspective. Her research is supervised by Prof. dr. Sandra Ponzanesi and dr. Wouter Oomen.
Lisa’s academic background is within Science and Technology Studies and Philosophy of Technology. She also holds a MSc from Aalborg University in Techno-Anthropology and a BA from University of Applied Science Utrecht in International Communication and Media. Read More
