Jenny Andrine Madsen Evang is Postdoctoral fellow in the Media and Culture Studies Department, and is associated with the Gender Studies cluster as well as the NWO-funded project “Virtual Reality as Empathy Machine,” under the leadership of Professor Sandra Ponzanesi. The project critically investigates the thorny political and emotional landscape of immersive VR used for humanitarian communication, asking how and at what cost VR can bridge the gap between viewers and “mediated others.” Jenny’s contribution to the project focused on theoretical perspectives on choreographed performances of virtual intimacy, analyzing the racialized and gendered dynamics of self-possession and dispossession within the emotional infrastructures of VR. She also investigates how alternative uses of VR might disrupt, rather than restabilize, the self’s mastery of various mediated others by turning to more recent, artistic uses of VR. Before joining Utrecht University, she received her PhD in Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford University in California, where her research centered on critical perspectives on inclusion, empathy, and Scandinavian exceptionalism from an interdisciplinary perspective. Her dissertation, Specters and Spectacles: (Un)Mediations of Empathy and Post-Racialism in Scandinavia, traverses the fields of queer theory, postcolonial studies, critical race theory, and media studies to articulate an analysis of the emotional infrastructures of contemporary media ecologies within the Nordic region, homing in on the bio- and necropolitical function of racial innocence and historical amnesia. Alongside this project, she has also been researching the function of racialized gender across the various actors involved in the contemporary anti-gender movement as well as the thorny relationship between queer and trans theory.