My Centre for Postdigital Cultures colleague Lindsay Balfour will be giving this talk later in the month. The Association for Cultural Studies <http://www.cultstud.org/wordpress/> (ACS) welcomes you to an upcoming talk in its *Virtual Lecture Series*, by *Lindsay Balfour (Coventry University, UK),* titled *‘Intimacy, Haunting, and the Digital Future of Hospitality’* (followed by a Q&A), which will take place on *June 24th, 5:30 PM BST/ British Summer Time (GMT +1)* (more information underneath). For more information on the Virtual Lecture Series and upcoming talks, please visit:https://www.cultstud.org/wordpress/virtual-lecture-series/ *Lindsay Balfour (Coventry University, UK) – Intimacy, Haunting, and the Digital Future of Hospitality* *June 24th, 2024* *5:30 PM BST/ British Summer Time (GMT +1)* *Abstract:* In October 2020, the online dating platform /Tinder/ released their campaign, “It’s Your Boo,” a tongue in cheek reference to a disturbing trend, where those who were guilty of “ghosting” prospective online-dating partners were given opportunity to reach out to those they abruptly disregarded months or years ago. Postdigital life remains haunted by promised and failed forms of intimacy with strangers and /Tinder/’s attempts to bring such ghosts back from the dead speaks to a deep preoccupation with strange and uncanny intimacies, and a reality of living with others, whether human or more-than-human, virtual or material. This talk works through the relationship between haunting, intimacy, and technology in a world where the digital future is very much a source of both relational anxiety and relational opportunity. Digital ghosts, of course, also conjure a kind of intimacy that is immaterial and unseen, reminding us of the forms of risky intimacy engendered by the spectres of contagion, parasitism, dust, and airborne strangers. The talk thus concludes with a move towards intimacy and the autoimmune – represented in the digital age by the figure of the computer virus but now also with other significant cultural meanings, especially in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Undoubtedly, thinking about postdigital intimacies through the concept of spectral strangers offers a new avenue for exploring the implications of virtual technologies on our ethical, social, and cultural life, as well as providing a new way to think the problem of intimacy itself. *Bio: Dr Lindsay Balfour* is Assistant Professor of Digital Media in the Centre for Postdigital Cultures (CPC) at Coventry University. Her research draws on the philosophical concept of hospitality to consider the relationship between humans and technology, and employs an intersectional feminist and cultural studies perspective to look at digital intimacies. Currently, she is conducting feminist analyses of intimate surveillance and embodied computing including the concept of “tracking” through wearables, implantables, and ingestibles. She is a member of the Postdigital Intimacies Research Network, the author of /Hospitality in a Time of Terror/ (Bucknell UP, 2017), as well as /The Digital Future of Hospitality/ and /FemTech: Intersectional Interventions in Women’s Digital Health/, both published in 2023, and many other articles and book chapters. Lindsay’s recent projects include working with cross-sector stakeholders to develop interventions for technologically-facilitated gender-based violence, funded by ESRC Impact Acceleration grants. *To register for this free event, please email:*vls@cultstud.org Please note that email registration is an automated process. If you do NOT receive a reply to your email with the relevant information within an hour, please check your spam folder, as some ISPs will treat this automated reply as spam. If the automated VLS message is not in your spam folder, please emailinfo@cultstud.org for more personal assistance. *Privacy notice:*We will use the address you email from to send you an invitation to the talk. The personal details (email address) of those registered are kept for the purpose of event registration only and will not be used for any other purposes. The records will be kept for one month after the registration. The ACS is the Data Controller of the records collected and is committed to protecting the rights of individuals in line with Data Protection Legislation. Please submit any data subject rights requests or address any complaints or suspected breaches toinfo@cultstud.org -- Gary Hall Professor of Media Director of the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University: https://postdigitalcultures.org/about/ Website:http://www.garyhall.info Follow on Mastodon here: @garyhall@hcommons.social Latest: Blog posts: 'A Brief History of Writing: From Human Meaning to Pattern Recognition and Beyond', with Joanna Zylinska, The Writing Platform:https://thewritingplatform.com/2024/05/a-brief-history-of-writing-from-human-meaning-to-computational-pattern-recognition-and-beyond/ 'Creative AI: Thinking Outside the Black Box', Media Theory:https://mediatheoryjournal.org/2024/05/24/gary-hall-creative-ai-thinking-outside-the-black-box/ 'Oxford and the Observer Do Social Mobility',http://garyhall.squarespace.com/journal/2024/6/10/oxford-and-the-observer-do-social-mobility.html