FACULTY OF EDUCATION AND SOCIETY | Lecture
Automating Compassion: App-Based Compassion Meditation
Tuesday 28 April, 15:15 - 17:00
Orkanen, C:231, Nordenskiöldsgatan 10
Can algorithms teach us to be kind and compassionate?
This talk draws on ethnographic research with users of compassion-based meditation apps to examine how these platforms often produce ‘private practices of self-care’ — ritualised, individual responses to distress that can replace community-based meditation practices. While such apps can commodify and individualise compassion, the research shows that embodied experiences within these practices sometimes challenge the binaries between self and other and between inside and outside, opening onto forms of interconnectedness rooted in nondual Buddhist thought. The talk weighs the risks of techno-solutionism against the surprising ways app-based compassion might cultivate collective sensibilities and a new aesthetics of existence.
Speaker
Dr Ana Eclair, Associate Professor in Gender Studies and Senior Research Affiliate at the Contemplative Studies Centre, University of Melbourne.
In collaboration with: Julieta Galante and Luara Karlson-Carp, Associate Professors at Contemplative Studies Centre, University of Melbourne.
About Ana Eclair
Associate Professor Ana Eclair (née Dragojlovic), PhD (The Australian National University), is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of queer feminist, decolonial, care and affect studies. Using queer feminist ethnography and mixed methods, her research examines practices of care and embodiment, most recently the uptake and effects of compassion meditation apps and their implications for private self-care and collective sensibilities.
