CFP for book edited by the “VR as Empathy Machine: Media, Migration and the Humanitarian Predicament” Research Group at Utrecht University
Book Title: Beyond the Empathy Machine: Critical Perspectives on Virtual Reality
Editors: Professor Sandra Ponzanesi (s.ponzanesi@uu.nl), Dr. Jenny Andrine Madsen Evang (j.a.m.evang@uu.nl), Dr. Wouter Oomen (w.a.oomen@uu.nl), Laurence Herfs (l.l.herfs@uu.nl), and Lisa Burghardt (l.burghardt@uu.nl)
©Laurence Herfs
Over the last decade or so, Virtual Reality (VR) has been honed as a new frontier in social tech. From Chris Milk and Gabo Arora’s invocation of VR as “the ultimate empathy machine” to the claims of VR as a possible prototypical “female-driven” technology to the UN’s post-covid framing of VR as a machine for peacebuilding (Glybchenko 2023), the medium has been posed as curative of a variety of society’s ills (compassion fatigue, polarization, an oversaturated media landscape, war—the list goes on). At the center of such curative imaginaries is the alleged ability of VR to construct immersive realities that transport you into new places and other bodies, thus viscerally letting you experience what traditional media only lets you observe at a distance. Often, the social power of such experiences is tethered to the promise of automating emotions by making you feel a certain way–VR, then, is framed as a medium of self-transformation precisely because of the new virtual and affective intimacies it forges. Within these dominant imagined intimacies, no Other shows up as a virtuous proxy for the self to feel as/with/for as often as the figure of the refugee/migrant, often in the form of a suffering child or a displaced woman of color.
But what is the price of this ameliorative imaginary of VR as a benign humanitarian tool? In the wake of such grand narratives, many critics have problematized the utopian celebrations of the medium–Lisa Nakamura, for example, analyzes the fantasy of VR as “toxic re-embodiment,” where the western self gets to “occupy the body of an other who might not even own their own body” (2020, 52). Riffing on Wendy Chun’s speech at the Weird Reality conference, Robert Yang deconstructs the seeming virtuous morality of VR as a “refugee tourism simulator,” writing that “if you walk in someone else's shoes, then you've taken their shoes. If you won't believe someone's pain unless they wrap an expensive 360 video around you, then perhaps you don't actually care about their pain” (2017). Other critics have similarly criticized the “techno-magical” (Hassan 2019) framings of VR by pointing out how the blissful overdetermination of the medium’s cutting-edge abilities are in fact obscuring the continuities between the medium’s appropriation of racialized experiences and longer lineages of objectification, spectacularization, and homogenization–from white abolitionists claiming Black bodies as the raw material for their own emotional education to contemporary voluntourist reality television shows where white people “go native.”
If we don’t want the “empathy machine” of humanitarian organizations married to the tech industry, then what do we want VR to (un)do? This edited anthology aims to bring together contributions that “stay with the trouble” of VR, homing in on the fruitful intersections among (but not limited to) critical media studies, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, feminisms, Black studies, queer studies, new materialisms, critical ethnographies, game studies, affect studies, critical phenomenology, anthropology, human rights and migration studies to analyze immersive media in new ways. Rather than simply throw the virtual baby out with the bathwater, this anthology homes in on the various uses and abuses of VR granularly, paying particular attention to divergent uses of the medium that showcase its complex mediating capacities, all the while never losing sight of the situated and sticky socio-cultural and political contexts of the various VR experiences. The anthology aims to go beyond the binaries of techno-utopianism and dystopian techno-determinism, highlighting instead what a postcolonial/decolonial/queer/critical approach might entail about the potentials and pitfalls of a variety of immersive projects. We also welcome contributions that analyze types of Extended Reality (XR) beyond VR, such as AR, MR, or other projects that fall under the banner of immersive digitalities. We especially encourage contributions that analyze recent VR projects made by artists and makers who work outside the bounds of the typical mainstream industries, as well as contributions that play with genre and form, such as roundtables, interviews with makers, festival spotlights, shorter close readings of individual VRs, collaborative meta-analyses of figurations/themes across various immersive installations.
Potential topics may include (but are not limited to):
I. State of the Arts & Origins
- The shifting imaginaries of VR: from empathy machine to human rights and peace machine
- Institutions of immersion: the UN, NGOs, and the art world
- Rethinking “VR for good” and the moral economy of empathy
- The aesthetics of immersion: authenticity, (dis)embodiment, control
- Potentials of VR: Imaginaries and Affordances of the Medium
- Art, funding, and the politics of virtual storytelling
- Global circuits of VR production and exhibition
- Postcolonial perspectives on the genealogy of immersive ethics and humanitarian affect
II. Temporalities of the Virtual
- Presentism, liveness, and the virtuous refugee
- Racial innocence and the redemptive telos of empathy
- Deep time and the planetary imagination in VR
- Virtual memory: personal, collective, prosthetic remembrances
- Trauma and temporality in immersive experiences
- The politics of witnessing across virtual times
- Coloniality and its temporalities in immersive media
III. Spatialities of the Virtual
- Escapism and embeddedness in immersive geographies
- The fantasy of total vision: the 360-degree Western gaze
- Exhibitionary spaces and the geographical mediation of immersion
- The architecture of empathy: designing encounters beyond unidirectional teleportation
- Disorientation, interactivity, and embodied movement
- Global locations and local virtualities from postcolonial perspectives
- Colonial imaginaries and identity tourism
- In/visible Infrastructures of VR
IV. Virtual Affect and Emotion
- Reading the Empathy Machine Against the Grain
- Technologies of Corporality
- Intimacy and Improper Distance
- Virtual Construction of Authenticity
- Rethinking the Affect/Emotion distinction in the age of the Empathy Machine
- Charity, Compassion, Care (Solidarity vs Empathy)
- Pre-discursive immersivity? The trouble with affect
- Feeling and Sensing through VR
V. Activism, Art, and Immersive Interventions
- Virtual activism and its limits
- Immersive art beyond the NGO-industrial complex
- Political VR and acts of resistance
- Aesthetics of solidarity and virtual witnessing beyond empathy
- Political documentary within virtual and immersive spaces
- Counter-narratives in artistic VR(s)
- The tensions between spectacle and critique within digital projects
VI. Curating VR and meeting the makers: Festivals, networks, and awards
- Curating VR: festivals, networks, infrastructures, volunteers
- Awards and circuits of global circulation
- VR as third space: publics, communities, encounters
- Immersive publics and collective spectatorship
- Artists within and against corporate tech platforms (e.g. META)
- Cross-media entanglements: VR and other art forms
- Conversations with makers and curators
- The labor of mediation: access, translation, and care
VII. Co-Creation and Alternative Futures
- Virtual co-creation and collaborative authorship
- Beyond the “native informant”: shared worldbuilding in VR
- Digital labor and mediated others
- Experimental and collective modes of production
- “Fourth VR” and decolonial collaborations
- Indigenous, diasporic, and transnational virtualities
- Decolonizing virtual space
- Designing with, not for: prototyping virtual futures
The anthology will not present a definitive conclusion on what “postcolonial VR” entails–rather, it aims to showcase the range and diversity of critical approaches to Virtual Reality that interrogate the medium beyond both the imaginary of the “Empathy machine” while also highlighting what postcolonial/decolonial/critical race studies/Black studies/queer theory might learn from analyses of immersive media. The anthology offers a timely and necessary intervention into the critical scholarship on VR ten years after Milk’s infamous “Empathy Machine” TED-talk, tracing both the diverging histories and futures of political/humanitarian/critical VR and immersive media in our post-cinematic age.
Submission Guidelines:
This anthology invites academic chapters, individual case studies, roundtables, explorative essays, essays and interviews based on conversations with makers, and other contributions by academics, artists, cultural workers, media designers, practitioners, activists, and others whose work intersects with postcolonial/decolonial/anti-colonial/queer approaches to VR.
Individuals or groups interested in contributing are invited to submit an extended abstract of 500-600 words, including the information outlined below, to postcolonialvrlab@gmail.com by February 15th, 2026. Inquiries about potential topics and framings may also be directed to this email address.
Your abstract should include:
- Your name and institutional affiliation (if applicable)
- Tentative title of your chapter
- A brief biographical statement (approximately 150 words) outlining relevant expertise and experience of contributor(s)
- The central argument, case study/studies, and theoretical frameworks of the text (if applicable)
- How the chapter relates to the overarching theme of the anthology and to which identified section(s)
- Bibliographical references (for academic contributions)
Timeline:
Abstract Submission Deadline: February 15th, 2026
Notification of Acceptance: March 15th, 2026
Submission Deadline: September 30th, 2026
Editorial Feedback: December 1st, 2026
Final Submission Deadline: April 1st, 2027
Full Submission:
Word limit (academic chapters): 5000– 7,000 words (including references)
Reference Style: Chicago Manual style
Word limit (case studies, roundtables, essays): 2500 – 5000 words (including references)
Bibliography:
Glybchenko, Yelyzaveta. 2023. “Virtual Reality Technologies as PeaceTech: Supporting Ukraine in Practice and Research.” Journal of Peacebuilding & Development 19 (1): 117–22. https://doi.org/10.1177/15423166231211303.
Hassan, Robert. 2019. “Digitality, Virtual Reality and the ‘Empathy Machine.’” Digital Journalism 8 (2): 195–212. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2018.1517604.
Nakamura, Lisa. 2020. “Feeling Good about Feeling Bad: Virtuous Virtual Reality and the Automation of Racial Empathy.” Journal of Visual Culture 19 (1): 47–64. https://doi.org/10.1177/1470412920906259.
Yang, Robert. 2017. “‘If You Walk in Someone Else’s Shoes, Then You’ve Taken Their Shoes’: Empathy Machines as Appropriation Machines.” Radiator Blog, April 6, 2017. https://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2017/04/if-you-walk-in-someone-elses-shoes-then.html
