Virtual Reality and the Feeling of Virtue: Women of Color Narrators, Enforced Hospitality, and the Leveraging of Empathy

This lecture analyzes women of color’s labor as virtual reality’s documentary subjects whose digital presence and hospitality within war-torn, emiserated, and inhospitable scenes such as a Lebanese refugee camp, a favela, and a cucumber farm enables a fantasy of virtuous empathy on the part of the viewer.

Lisa Nakamura, Professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, will deliver the fourth talk in the 2018-19 Thinking Cinema series.