Amanda Lagerkvist
Biographic Data
| ID | 316303 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Amanda Lagerkvist |
| GIVEN NAMES | Amanda |
| FAMILY NAME | Lagerkvist |
| SIGNATURE | LAGERKVIST A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Uppsala University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2059-645X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 112 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Prophetic memory
A new breed of prophets – intermediaries and pastoral bros of an AI industry with metaphysical aspirations – has surfaced on the global stage during troubled times. They make great promises, offer predictions and warnings, and stake out directions for humanity. This article argues that they do so by invoking the implicit collective memory of the apocalyptic imaginary known from ancient Jewish apocalyptic writings and, more specifically, by reenac…
The Senseless Machine
Combining crip theory and existential media studies, the purpose of this theoretical essay is to critically interrogate a biometric palm-reading device that turns the hand into a means for payment – connecting its datafied veins to one’s assets – by unpacking its specific “techno-logics” and probing its forceful yet ambivalent sociotechnical imaginary. Palm recognition technology relies on the annulment of touch which calls forth, and depends on,…
Body stakes
This article discusses the key existential stakes of implementing biometrics in human lifeworlds. In this pursuit, we offer a problematization and reinvention of central values often taken for granted within the “ethical turn” of AI development and discourse, such as autonomy, agency, privacy and integrity, as we revisit basic questions about what it means to be human and embodied. Within a framework of existential media studies, we introduce an …
The mediated planet
Over the past half century, the global environment has become subject to an accelerated pace of mediation and datafication. This ongoing transition has become so comprehensive that the knowledge, management and governance of the Earth system is dependent on enormous flows of data from a “vast machine” of measuring tools. These processes combined have formed what we call a “mediated planet,” subject to interpretation and shared human decision-maki…
Yearning for a You
In a troubled world, the launch of ChatGPT generated both cultural hopes and eschatological fears. It also reactivated the classic question of whether a 'someone' is 'at home' in the model, or why people act toward machines as if they are persons. This experimental essay reopens that question, arguing that the strong drive to establish 'pan-relations' is not solely due to deceit; through relational expectancy, an I is yearning for a Thou in commu…
Reawakenings to the improbable
The global pandemic threw the world in all its asymmetries and diversities into a limit situation without known coordinates. This article suggests that in its aftermath there is actually a call and an opportunity for more than rethinking existing keywords in the field. It argues that the crisis was “improbable” in the meaning of the word offered by Amitav Ghosh who traces a common sense forged by probabilistic science, that expelled the unthinkab…
Whispers of a Secret
Upon arrival in Sweden, Speaking into the Air was not spoken about. Instead, it was whispered about—often with admiration, sometimes in perplexment. This article contextualizes the non-reception in light of three circumstances: the Swedish consensus culture in which dialogue is sacred, the role of media in the nation for disseminating the dialogical praxis and its results, and the Swedish model of media studies. The article shows how the book’s m…
Existential Media
This book offers a reappreciation and revisiting of existential philosophy—and in particular of Karl Jaspers’s philosophy—for media theory in order to remedy the existential deficit in the field. The book thereby also offers an introduction to the young field of existential media studies. Jaspers’s concept of the limit situation is chosen as a privileged reality which allows for bringing limits, in all their shapes and forms, onto the radar when …
Digital Limit Situations
In the present age AI (artificial intelligence) emerges as both a medium to and message about (or even from) the future, eclipsing all other possible prospects. Discussing how AI succeeds in presenting itself as an arrival on the human horizon at the end times, this theoretical essay scrutinizes the ‘inevitability’ of AI-driven abstract futures and probes how such imaginaries become living myths, by attending how the technology is embedded in bro…
The grand interruption
This essay aims to shed light on two online phenomena dominated by women in the contemporary Swedish context—blogs about terminal illness and support groups for the bereaved—and explore what they mean for those afflicted by suffering and loss. We will show that in the shadow of the grand interruption—the moment when the life narrative itself is cut off because of imminent or sudden death—the studied online activities of mourners and the illness s…
Existential media
Our digitally enforced lifeworld is an existential and ambivalent terrain. Questions concerning digital technologies are thus questions about human existence. This theoretical essay employs key concepts from existential philosophy to envision an existential media analysis that accounts for the thrownness of digital human existence. Tracing our digital thrownness to four emergent fields of inquiry, that relate to classic themes (death, time, being…
Media and Memory in New Shanghai
Contributing to current debates about the globality and mediatisation of memories, Media and Memory in New Shanghai interrogates the city's spectacular regeneration into an emergent world centre, desc
Communicating the Rhythms of Retromodernity
Visitors on sight-seeing tours in contemporary globalizing Shanghai observe the futuristic ambitions, exponential development and chaotic polyrhythmicity of New Shanghai. The nostalgia industry simultaneously 'teleports' the tourists on tours back to a time when Shanghai was a legendary world metropolis; the Golden Age of the inter-war era. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's critical rhythmanalysis, and by Jonathan Sterne's conceptualization of communi…
In Sweden
During the ten years that have passed since the mediated terrorist attacks in the United States on 9.11, 2001, they have become—through instant historicization as well as endless repetitions—stable points of reference for transnational collective memory. Focalizing the anniversaries of September 11, 2002 and 2011, on Swedish television, this article pursues how the medium annually commemorates the tragedy. Fusing television research with memory s…
The Future Is Here
Thriving on its long-term collective memory of possessing futurity, Shanghai resurges with large-scale ambitions of becoming the world center of trade and finance as well as the information and communication hub of the Asia-Pacific region with an Infoport advancing beyond the era of the Internet. This article ponders the relationship between memory and futurity in Shanghai, and suggests that in celebrating temporal coexistence, Shanghai offers th…
A Virtual America
Expatriate spaces on the outskirts of New Shanghai constitute a new transnational social space inhabited by many different nationalities. Yet these areas are often understood as 'American' spaces
Strange Spaces
Contents: What is strange about strange spaces?, AndrA(c) Jansson and Amanda Lagerkvist Part 1 Scales of Opacity: Introduction to Part 1 AndrA(c) Jansson and Amanda Lagerkvist Vague spaces, Phil Carney and Vincent Miller Domesticated media: hiding, dying or haunting, Orvar LA fgren The strange space of the body: 2 dialogues, Eva A...hrA(c)n and Michael Sappol Obscure objects of media studies: echo, hotbird and ikonos, Lisa Parks. Part 2 Dislocati…
The Future Gaze
In this article, we show how the abstract city — media representations of city panoramas and the factual physical silhouette standing in for the city itself in the distance — is constituted as an emotive geography and how the production of such vistas is a political project, whose aim is to activate a future gaze . Through analysing two cities — Montreal in 1967 and contemporary Shanghai — we demonstrate how the mediatized production of urban pan…
Travels in Thirdspace
What happens to people's relationship to places that have been subjected to a high degree of mediation? The aim of this article is to engage in current debates on mediaspace and the mediatization of travelling, by offering an empirical and conceptual qualification to this discussion, through a study of the experiences of Swedes travelling in the US in the 1950s. This article shows that in understanding the relationship between communication and g…
"Gazing at Pudong-"With a Drink in Your Hand
The Chinese mega city of Shanghai is currently undergoing a radical restructuring of its infrastructure and urban fabric and aspires to become a future city and a world center. This article delineates an encapsulation of a future gaze in the city among cosmopolitan visitors, mediated through travel reporting, travel guides and expatriate websites. Shanghai is a multisensuous and highly engaging geography and invokes a future gaze which, in contra…
We See America
In this article I explore the many different meanings of the mediatized meeting with New York (how gazing at the Manhattan skyline ‘felt like being at the movies’) from the point of departure of how traveling Swedes – mainly male, middle aged and of middle- and upper-class backgrounds – made sense of America in travel writing from 1945–1963. By analyzing the pivotal arrival scenes in these narratives in conjunction with the accompanying illustrat…
Swedes Visualize America
Existential media
Our digitally enforced lifeworld is an existential and ambivalent terrain. Questions concerning digital technologies are thus questions about human existence. This theoretical essay employs key concepts from existential philosophy to envision an existential media analysis that accounts for the thrownness of digital human existence. Tracing our digital thrownness to four emergent fields of inquiry, that relate to classic themes (death, time, being…
The Future Gaze
In this article, we show how the abstract city — media representations of city panoramas and the factual physical silhouette standing in for the city itself in the distance — is constituted as an emotive geography and how the production of such vistas is a political project, whose aim is to activate a future gaze . Through analysing two cities — Montreal in 1967 and contemporary Shanghai — we demonstrate how the mediatized production of urban pan…
The Future Is Here
Thriving on its long-term collective memory of possessing futurity, Shanghai resurges with large-scale ambitions of becoming the world center of trade and finance as well as the information and communication hub of the Asia-Pacific region with an Infoport advancing beyond the era of the Internet. This article ponders the relationship between memory and futurity in Shanghai, and suggests that in celebrating temporal coexistence, Shanghai offers th…
The grand interruption
This essay aims to shed light on two online phenomena dominated by women in the contemporary Swedish context—blogs about terminal illness and support groups for the bereaved—and explore what they mean for those afflicted by suffering and loss. We will show that in the shadow of the grand interruption—the moment when the life narrative itself is cut off because of imminent or sudden death—the studied online activities of mourners and the illness s…
We See America
In this article I explore the many different meanings of the mediatized meeting with New York (how gazing at the Manhattan skyline ‘felt like being at the movies’) from the point of departure of how traveling Swedes – mainly male, middle aged and of middle- and upper-class backgrounds – made sense of America in travel writing from 1945–1963. By analyzing the pivotal arrival scenes in these narratives in conjunction with the accompanying illustrat…
"Gazing at Pudong-"With a Drink in Your Hand
The Chinese mega city of Shanghai is currently undergoing a radical restructuring of its infrastructure and urban fabric and aspires to become a future city and a world center. This article delineates an encapsulation of a future gaze in the city among cosmopolitan visitors, mediated through travel reporting, travel guides and expatriate websites. Shanghai is a multisensuous and highly engaging geography and invokes a future gaze which, in contra…
The mediated planet
Over the past half century, the global environment has become subject to an accelerated pace of mediation and datafication. This ongoing transition has become so comprehensive that the knowledge, management and governance of the Earth system is dependent on enormous flows of data from a “vast machine” of measuring tools. These processes combined have formed what we call a “mediated planet,” subject to interpretation and shared human decision-maki…
Media and Memory in New Shanghai
Contributing to current debates about the globality and mediatisation of memories, Media and Memory in New Shanghai interrogates the city's spectacular regeneration into an emergent world centre, desc
Communicating the Rhythms of Retromodernity
Visitors on sight-seeing tours in contemporary globalizing Shanghai observe the futuristic ambitions, exponential development and chaotic polyrhythmicity of New Shanghai. The nostalgia industry simultaneously 'teleports' the tourists on tours back to a time when Shanghai was a legendary world metropolis; the Golden Age of the inter-war era. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's critical rhythmanalysis, and by Jonathan Sterne's conceptualization of communi…
Reawakenings to the improbable
The global pandemic threw the world in all its asymmetries and diversities into a limit situation without known coordinates. This article suggests that in its aftermath there is actually a call and an opportunity for more than rethinking existing keywords in the field. It argues that the crisis was “improbable” in the meaning of the word offered by Amitav Ghosh who traces a common sense forged by probabilistic science, that expelled the unthinkab…
In Sweden
During the ten years that have passed since the mediated terrorist attacks in the United States on 9.11, 2001, they have become—through instant historicization as well as endless repetitions—stable points of reference for transnational collective memory. Focalizing the anniversaries of September 11, 2002 and 2011, on Swedish television, this article pursues how the medium annually commemorates the tragedy. Fusing television research with memory s…
Yearning for a You
In a troubled world, the launch of ChatGPT generated both cultural hopes and eschatological fears. It also reactivated the classic question of whether a 'someone' is 'at home' in the model, or why people act toward machines as if they are persons. This experimental essay reopens that question, arguing that the strong drive to establish 'pan-relations' is not solely due to deceit; through relational expectancy, an I is yearning for a Thou in commu…
Digital Limit Situations
In the present age AI (artificial intelligence) emerges as both a medium to and message about (or even from) the future, eclipsing all other possible prospects. Discussing how AI succeeds in presenting itself as an arrival on the human horizon at the end times, this theoretical essay scrutinizes the ‘inevitability’ of AI-driven abstract futures and probes how such imaginaries become living myths, by attending how the technology is embedded in bro…
Travels in Thirdspace
What happens to people's relationship to places that have been subjected to a high degree of mediation? The aim of this article is to engage in current debates on mediaspace and the mediatization of travelling, by offering an empirical and conceptual qualification to this discussion, through a study of the experiences of Swedes travelling in the US in the 1950s. This article shows that in understanding the relationship between communication and g…
Swedes Visualize America
Swedes Visualize America
We See America
In this article I explore the many different meanings of the mediatized meeting with New York (how gazing at the Manhattan skyline ‘felt like being at the movies’) from the point of departure of how traveling Swedes – mainly male, middle aged and of middle- and upper-class backgrounds – made sense of America in travel writing from 1945–1963. By analyzing the pivotal arrival scenes in these narratives in conjunction with the accompanying illustrat…
"Gazing at Pudong-"With a Drink in Your Hand
The Chinese mega city of Shanghai is currently undergoing a radical restructuring of its infrastructure and urban fabric and aspires to become a future city and a world center. This article delineates an encapsulation of a future gaze in the city among cosmopolitan visitors, mediated through travel reporting, travel guides and expatriate websites. Shanghai is a multisensuous and highly engaging geography and invokes a future gaze which, in contra…
Travels in Thirdspace
What happens to people's relationship to places that have been subjected to a high degree of mediation? The aim of this article is to engage in current debates on mediaspace and the mediatization of travelling, by offering an empirical and conceptual qualification to this discussion, through a study of the experiences of Swedes travelling in the US in the 1950s. This article shows that in understanding the relationship between communication and g…
Strange Spaces
Contents: What is strange about strange spaces?, AndrA(c) Jansson and Amanda Lagerkvist Part 1 Scales of Opacity: Introduction to Part 1 AndrA(c) Jansson and Amanda Lagerkvist Vague spaces, Phil Carney and Vincent Miller Domesticated media: hiding, dying or haunting, Orvar LA fgren The strange space of the body: 2 dialogues, Eva A...hrA(c)n and Michael Sappol Obscure objects of media studies: echo, hotbird and ikonos, Lisa Parks. Part 2 Dislocati…
The Future Gaze
In this article, we show how the abstract city — media representations of city panoramas and the factual physical silhouette standing in for the city itself in the distance — is constituted as an emotive geography and how the production of such vistas is a political project, whose aim is to activate a future gaze . Through analysing two cities — Montreal in 1967 and contemporary Shanghai — we demonstrate how the mediatized production of urban pan…
The Future Is Here
Thriving on its long-term collective memory of possessing futurity, Shanghai resurges with large-scale ambitions of becoming the world center of trade and finance as well as the information and communication hub of the Asia-Pacific region with an Infoport advancing beyond the era of the Internet. This article ponders the relationship between memory and futurity in Shanghai, and suggests that in celebrating temporal coexistence, Shanghai offers th…
A Virtual America
Expatriate spaces on the outskirts of New Shanghai constitute a new transnational social space inhabited by many different nationalities. Yet these areas are often understood as 'American' spaces
In Sweden
During the ten years that have passed since the mediated terrorist attacks in the United States on 9.11, 2001, they have become—through instant historicization as well as endless repetitions—stable points of reference for transnational collective memory. Focalizing the anniversaries of September 11, 2002 and 2011, on Swedish television, this article pursues how the medium annually commemorates the tragedy. Fusing television research with memory s…
Media and Memory in New Shanghai
Contributing to current debates about the globality and mediatisation of memories, Media and Memory in New Shanghai interrogates the city's spectacular regeneration into an emergent world centre, desc
Communicating the Rhythms of Retromodernity
Visitors on sight-seeing tours in contemporary globalizing Shanghai observe the futuristic ambitions, exponential development and chaotic polyrhythmicity of New Shanghai. The nostalgia industry simultaneously 'teleports' the tourists on tours back to a time when Shanghai was a legendary world metropolis; the Golden Age of the inter-war era. Inspired by Henri Lefebvre's critical rhythmanalysis, and by Jonathan Sterne's conceptualization of communi…
Existential media
Our digitally enforced lifeworld is an existential and ambivalent terrain. Questions concerning digital technologies are thus questions about human existence. This theoretical essay employs key concepts from existential philosophy to envision an existential media analysis that accounts for the thrownness of digital human existence. Tracing our digital thrownness to four emergent fields of inquiry, that relate to classic themes (death, time, being…
The grand interruption
This essay aims to shed light on two online phenomena dominated by women in the contemporary Swedish context—blogs about terminal illness and support groups for the bereaved—and explore what they mean for those afflicted by suffering and loss. We will show that in the shadow of the grand interruption—the moment when the life narrative itself is cut off because of imminent or sudden death—the studied online activities of mourners and the illness s…
Digital Limit Situations
In the present age AI (artificial intelligence) emerges as both a medium to and message about (or even from) the future, eclipsing all other possible prospects. Discussing how AI succeeds in presenting itself as an arrival on the human horizon at the end times, this theoretical essay scrutinizes the ‘inevitability’ of AI-driven abstract futures and probes how such imaginaries become living myths, by attending how the technology is embedded in bro…
Whispers of a Secret
Upon arrival in Sweden, Speaking into the Air was not spoken about. Instead, it was whispered about—often with admiration, sometimes in perplexment. This article contextualizes the non-reception in light of three circumstances: the Swedish consensus culture in which dialogue is sacred, the role of media in the nation for disseminating the dialogical praxis and its results, and the Swedish model of media studies. The article shows how the book’s m…
Existential Media
This book offers a reappreciation and revisiting of existential philosophy—and in particular of Karl Jaspers’s philosophy—for media theory in order to remedy the existential deficit in the field. The book thereby also offers an introduction to the young field of existential media studies. Jaspers’s concept of the limit situation is chosen as a privileged reality which allows for bringing limits, in all their shapes and forms, onto the radar when …
Reawakenings to the improbable
The global pandemic threw the world in all its asymmetries and diversities into a limit situation without known coordinates. This article suggests that in its aftermath there is actually a call and an opportunity for more than rethinking existing keywords in the field. It argues that the crisis was “improbable” in the meaning of the word offered by Amitav Ghosh who traces a common sense forged by probabilistic science, that expelled the unthinkab…
Body stakes
This article discusses the key existential stakes of implementing biometrics in human lifeworlds. In this pursuit, we offer a problematization and reinvention of central values often taken for granted within the “ethical turn” of AI development and discourse, such as autonomy, agency, privacy and integrity, as we revisit basic questions about what it means to be human and embodied. Within a framework of existential media studies, we introduce an …
The mediated planet
Over the past half century, the global environment has become subject to an accelerated pace of mediation and datafication. This ongoing transition has become so comprehensive that the knowledge, management and governance of the Earth system is dependent on enormous flows of data from a “vast machine” of measuring tools. These processes combined have formed what we call a “mediated planet,” subject to interpretation and shared human decision-maki…
Yearning for a You
In a troubled world, the launch of ChatGPT generated both cultural hopes and eschatological fears. It also reactivated the classic question of whether a 'someone' is 'at home' in the model, or why people act toward machines as if they are persons. This experimental essay reopens that question, arguing that the strong drive to establish 'pan-relations' is not solely due to deceit; through relational expectancy, an I is yearning for a Thou in commu…
The Senseless Machine
Combining crip theory and existential media studies, the purpose of this theoretical essay is to critically interrogate a biometric palm-reading device that turns the hand into a means for payment – connecting its datafied veins to one’s assets – by unpacking its specific “techno-logics” and probing its forceful yet ambivalent sociotechnical imaginary. Palm recognition technology relies on the annulment of touch which calls forth, and depends on,…
Prophetic memory
A new breed of prophets – intermediaries and pastoral bros of an AI industry with metaphysical aspirations – has surfaced on the global stage during troubled times. They make great promises, offer predictions and warnings, and stake out directions for humanity. This article argues that they do so by invoking the implicit collective memory of the apocalyptic imaginary known from ancient Jewish apocalyptic writings and, more specifically, by reenac…
Sociology (18 works) · Political science (11 works) · Media studies (10 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Aesthetics (8 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Existentialism (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Art (6 works)