ABOUT MODEL EMOTION
Model Emotion explores how the way humans model their relationships with the world through technologies old and new facilitates model conditions for emotional flourishing. Sometimes our modeling goes well and we create the conditions we envision for health and happiness. Other times our models turn against us and we create techniques and technologies that consume our attention and inhibit our freedom. The Model Emotion website is a platform for conducting, connecting, and sharing anthropological research with an aim to integrate the human and hard sciences. Growing out of the research project MODEM, our work social transformations brought about by technological advances in affective robotics and artificial emotional intelligence. Today we carry out a range of projects, from ethnographic fieldwork on emotional robotics, to artistic projects that help us imagine and shape positive trajectories for AI, to theoretical work on affective wellbeing, to community-based partnerships to heal human-land relations. While we focus regionally on Japan, our team collaborates with partners throughout the Asia-Pacific region and beyond.
OUR TEAM
DANIEL WHITE
RESEARCH FELLOW
University College London / University of Cambridge
Dan is a research fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University College London and at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge. Trained in cultural anthropology (PhD, Rice University), he conducts research on cross-cultural approaches to affect and emotion in cultural policy, public institutions, and in the fields of affective computing and artificial emotional intelligence in Japan, Europe, and North America.
HIROFUMI KATSUNO
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR
Doshisha University
Hiro is a professor of media studies and anthropology in the Faculty of Social Studies at Doshisha University. Trained in cultural anthropology (PhD, University of Hawaiʻi), he researchers the socio-cultural impact of new media technologies, particularly focusing on the formation of presence in technologically mediated environments.
OUR PROJECTS
MODEM
ELEMENTS OF JOY
The Elements of Joy
Research on how people find health, happiness, and wholeness by modeling their lives on the natural elements of earth. Part of the global research collaborative AnthropoloJOY, it works with people across diverse cultural traditions to learn how cultivating land and sea through joyful acts of environmental care fosters care for others in difficult times.
AfAR
