Digital Intimacies and Emerging Adults in Southern Europe

This project aims to be the basis of a series of international collaborations between different academic institutions, and between academia and civil society, in exploring the techno-mediated landscape of contemporary digital intimacies. We will dedicate a special emphasis to young / emerging adults, and to the impacts – positive and negative, personal and communitarian, subjective and material – that the COVID19 pandemic has had on how processes of intimate sociability have quickly changed, morphed, and also remained surprisingly similar. To address this timely, yet rapidly morphing and open-ended phenomenon, we will foster ongoing research – by organizing an edited book volume on the topic, and by supporting PhD students in their research efforts, garner input from civil society – by listening to young adults and to how their experiences might help inform research agendas -, and by submitting an application for a prestigious ERC grant to produce innovative research on the topic. Within the context of informational capitalism, the current limitations to human circulation pose a series of challenges but also opportunities for both companies working with digitized intimacies (e.g.: Tinder, OnlyFans) and for prosumers / producers. Issues of autonomy, exploitation, profiteering, changing sexual mores and dynamics, sexualities’ diversity, data protection, the transformations in digital sex work and the way legislation and companies act towards it – all of these will be at the centre of our inquiries. We intend to both produce high-quality research that addresses current social challenges, as well as create the resources to derive evidence-based recommendations in terms of policies and cultural representations and values.