Our workshop responds to challenges posed by streaming and AI, pivotal technogical advancements, that have unfolded amidst a conservative turn in domestic and international politics. These challenges have re-defined practices of ‘intimacy’ through regimes of hypervisibility, rendering our personal lives governable. Simultaneously, privileging knowledge grounded in people’s actions and lived experiences, we also see ‘intimacy’ as a field of resistance, with the digital realm supplying novel and under-researched forms and practices of intimacy.

Intimacy

We understand intimacy in broad terms:

• as a point of familiarity, kinship and friendship, paving the way for new associations and allegiances across the political spectrum,
• as an affinity that secures rapport and belonging and can enhance efficiency of capitalist production, on the one hand, and on the other, resistance to the demands of capitalism, and
• as a discursive framework for sex and sexuality and practices of surveillance and counter-surveillance, expressions of queerness, and (transgressive) acts of storytelling and encounters that unmake the boundaries between individual and state, public and private, and audience and speaker/producer.

We invite contributions to consider digital intimacies as they intersect with subjectivities, networks, regulatory frameworks, market logics and/ or AI.

We also ask all participants to use their research to consider what ‘intimacy’ comes to signify, when mediated and remediated through digital platforms.

• We invite papers that consider practices of personal disclosures that include the sharing of life-stories, emotions and experiences through digital media. Intimacy here could refer to ‘content’ but also to modes of storytelling enabled by digital media.
• We ask participants to address intimacy as a social practice that is collectively recognised and reinforced through streaming. This involves considering community practices and peer-to-peer groups based on shared vulnerabilities and precarities.We expect papers in this context to pay heed to intersectional subjective experiences, considering race, gender and/or sexuality as pivotal features and frames of intimate practice.
• As intimacy and intimate experiences are also key ingredients in interpersonal and societal trust relations, the workshop will address the large-scale, societal dynamics around trust in and trust by technologies, speaking to the societal-level transformations due to digitization, taking micro-level intimacy practices as the starting point.
• Participants may consider digital intimacies as a form of affective labour where emotions, both personal and public, are managed and produced in the service of capital. Such a perspective would allow us to understand how intimacies are governed not only by social pressure, but also by market logics and legal provisions.
• We would like participants to address the question of how streaming functions as an enabler and gatekeeper of experience of the geopolitical, cultural and historical construct of ‘Europe’. We propose that Europe is experienced as an intimate flow, on one level, and on another, as a feeling that is simultaneously affirmative and transgressive.