Memory, Trust, and Touch: the post-pandemic perspective

Abstract

This lecture will examine ways in which the experience and memory of the COVID-19 pandemic have shaped our notions about trust and touch and how the move towards digital transactions may be read as a complex reflection of the same. In doing so, Dr Parui will aim to highlight how the post-digital in the post-pandemic may be seen as a method through which human trust apropos of touch may be monitored and minimised and how the material ontology of digitality may be seen as an anxious and an accelerated mechanism that also corresponds to notions about hygiene, safety, and sanitisation. The lecture will draw on works in phenomenology and philosophy of mind, also examining recent research on touch and memory in cognitive psychology. In its philosophical scope, it will try to offer a complex study of the cultural condition post-pandemic and how the materiality of digitality corresponds to the entanglement of trust and tactility that also creates new notions of safe and unsafe identities. 

This lecture is free and open to all. Registration is not required to attend in person.