2021 Conference Ahlist – Madrid

General Conference Topic: Identity and Wellbeing

Through the experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, the use of (bio)technology has become essential to sustain society, community and livelihood of human beings. On the individual level, while trying to survive the coronavirus and maintain the status quo, s/he has to juggle multiple types of realities: pandemic reality, social(-distance) reality, virtual reality, collaborative virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, hyperreality, personal reality, alternative realities, and so forth. The array, complexity, and variances among these several realities are remarkable. In the face of these various realities, we struggle to preserve (and/or often interpolate) our identities and wellbeing from one reality to another. Fields such as literature, history and cultural studies, inspired by Michel Foucault among others, have examined and deliberated about the dimensional and diachronic aspects of identities, as well as the construction of cultural and social identities and wellbeing. Meanwhile, in the fields related to technology and science, researchers have explored and analyzed synchronic and compartmentalized characteristics of identities in virtual, augmented, and mixed realities.

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