To Heal/To Kill: Inquiring into Corporeal Displacements in Medicine and Military within Emerging Cyberworlds

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Denisa Butnaru
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Sociological Theory
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 569872194

The aim of this research is to investigate how the design and use of cyber technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and artificial intelligence (AI) engender corporeal displacements in medicine and military practice, giving rise to ambivalent materialities. Building on classical and contemporary approaches in phenomenology, the sociology of the body and technology, and science and technology studies (STS), the study explores how this ambivalence contributes to the formation of unprecedented modes of embodiment at the intersection of facts and artifacts, while addressing the dual use of these technologies: to heal/ to kill. In this context, the project aims to examine the resources mobilized in processes whereby corporeality is gradually evacuated, displaced, or experientially relocated through AR, VR, and, AI. It seeks to offer a novel understanding of how transformations induced by these cyber technologies reshape histories of sensitivity and their associated phenomenological specificities within healthcare and militaryscapes. The intention is to investigate whether emerging conceptions and experiences of the human body are being revalorized through AR, VR, and AI, and whether digitally defined forms of vulnerability circulate between warfare and healthcare. As the dislocation of senses and skills by cyber technologies may shape future possibilities of being bodies and may be linked to possibilities of bio-objectification in the fields under investigation, a central question that this research poses is how much ‘lived bodies’ can resist such transformations, and whether they may engage in specific processes of alienation that enable the categorization of new phenomenological dimensions. Often, at the core of these circulations, body-based expertise is challenged by the spread of digital surrogacy, requiring to understand how experts and users of cyber technologies in medicine and armed forces negotiate meanings of corporeality and their associated phenomenological repertoires. In order to analyze the tensions, polarizations, risks and vulnerabilities that define such unprecedented bodyscapes, the research relies on extensive qualitative fieldwork. This includes focused and multi-sited ethnography, digital and sensory ethnographic methods, and semi-structured interviews with both users and experts. By engaging with these uncharted territories, the study seeks to contribute to the sociology of the body and technology, with particular attention to emergent sensate regimes and their specific phenomenological dimensions in military and medical contexts.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants