Amanda Lagerkvist is Professor of Media and Communication Studies at Uppsala University and founder of existential media studies, a field she has established as a major theoretical and empirical approach to understanding digital culture.
Lagerkvist is internationally recognised for developing a distinctive framework that brings existential philosophy into media theory. Her work reconceptualises digital media as sites of “limit situations”, where fundamental questions of human existence, vulnerability, and meaning are negotiated. Her monograph Existential Media: A Media Theory of the Limit Situation (Oxford University Press, 2022) is widely regarded as a foundational contribution, introducing and systematising this approach. Across a substantial body of publications, she has advanced research on digital memory, online mourning, and the digital afterlife, and more recently on biometric AI, disability, and the ethics of automated media.
Her contributions extend beyond scholarship into institution-building and research leadership. She is Principal Investigator of the Uppsala Hub for Digital Existence and has founded the Human Observatory for Digital Existence, an innovative collaborative platform engaging scholars, public institutions, and civil society in examining what it means to be human under conditions of rapid technological change. She has led major externally funded research programmes, including “Existential Terrains” and the WASP-HS project “BioMe,” supported by the Wallenberg Foundations and other leading funding bodies. Her work has also been supported by the Swedish Research Council and the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation.
Lagerkvist’s academic trajectory includes a PhD from Stockholm University, subsequent research fellowships, and appointments across leading Swedish institutions, as well as international engagements as visiting scholar at King’s College London and guest professor at the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities. She has also contributed to academic leadership through roles such as Chair of Digital Humanities Uppsala and board member of the Fulbright Commission Sweden.
Her work is widely published in leading international journals, including New Media & Society, Media, Culture & Society, AI & Society, and Feminist Media Studies, and has played a central role in shaping interdisciplinary conversations across media studies, philosophy of technology, and digital ethics. She has also built and led the international DIGMEX network, connecting over 180 scholars across disciplines.
Photo: SDU.