Join us for an online seminar series exploring how emotions are measured, managed, and mobilized through digital technologies and data-driven governance. Sessions will examine topics such as affective and embodied computing, algorithmic decision-making, biometric surveillance, histories and futures of affect cultures, the strengths and weaknesses of anticipatory ethics, digital and embodied warfare, and the politics of emotional AI. The seminars are online and open to all.
With these talks we will generate discussion on the implications of emerging emotion sensing technologies for public policy, ethics, and everyday life in a digitally mediated world. Speakers provide critical perspectives on technology, governance, and society. Engage with leading thinkers and contribute to global conversations on the future of digital emotional governance.
The series is organised by Jessica Pykett, University of Birmingham and Tabea Bork-Hüffer, Heidelberg University. Jessica is Co-Director of the Centre for Urban Wellbeing, Principal Investigator of the ESRC Ethics and Expertise project and Co-Investigator at the ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures. Tabea is Co-Director of the Heidelberg Centre of the Environment, founding member and Co-Investigator at the Camilla and Georg Jellinek Centre for Ethics, Heidelberg University, and Principal Investigator of the FWF Enabling Spaces projects.
In our first session, Prof Minna Ruckenstein, Professor of Emerging Technologies in Society at the Consumer Society Research Centre, University of Helsinki. In The Feel of Algorithms, Prof Ruckenstein discuss the algorithmic culture that emerges as people establish and maintain human–machine connections. She argues that it is not enough to ask what algorithmic systems are doing to us; we must also consider what we are doing to them. How are we feeding such systems with our stories, responses, and affective orientations? The enthusiasm, fears, and frustrations that people express support a broader argument: feelings are form-giving social forces that define contemporary algorithmic culture.
Prof Ruckstein shifts the perspective to design processes that aim to influence how people feel about themselves and latest technologies. She focuses on the design of an LLM-enhanced chatbot that is deliberately dehumanised as a protective gesture. This case shows that emotional governance is embedded in what the system aims to do, and in how the boundaries of humanness and interaction are defined. It moves the focus from the technology to the organisational and collective arrangements that give AI systems purpose and agency. Whether systems manipulate emotions or avoid doing so, they are embedded in value aims that define what the system is allowed to do and what it should do.
Minna Ruckenstein is Professor of Emerging Technologies in Society at the Consumer Society Research Centre, University of Helsinki. She leads the Datafied Life Collaboratory and directs collaborative projects that combine cutting-edge research on algorithmic systems and AI uses with classical social scientific concerns about the formation of values, individual and social ties, and the organisation of society.