Grants, Scholarships, and Awards

• 2025

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"Hear the Tap, Feel the Scratch"

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Publication grant from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) for the book "Hear the Tap, Feel the Scratch: Transgressive Intimacy of ASMR"

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This is the first in-depth cultural study of ASMR as a sensory and media practice. Rather than treating ASMR as a neurological oddity, the book explores it as a post-cinematic form of affective media – designed to be felt rather than merely watched. Drawing on media theory, posthumanism, and affect studies, it analyzes how ASMR videos – through whispers, tapping, and slow gestures – create intimate, caring experiences that blur the lines between human and machine, real and simulated. Combining theoretical insights with digital ethnography, the book situates ASMR within contemporary wellness and self-care culture, showing how it offers mediated comfort and connection in a digitally saturated world.

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• 2021–2024

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"ASMR as a New Intimacy Practice in Western Culture"

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Postdoctoral project funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), conducted at the University of Vienna, Department of Theatre, Film and Media Studies (tfm)

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In the project, it has been demonstrated that cultural and media phenomenon known as Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) contributes to building new mediatized and digitized practices of intimacy in the contemporary Western society. The project explored the internet phenomenon of ASMR in the context of contemporary changes of human practices connected to establishing, maintaining, and nurturing intimacy. It has been shown that ASMR culture is rooted in the variety of processes of human-machine interactions and interlacings attempting to convey the multifaceted nature of intimacy.

 

In the project, I investigated various communication strategies and modes (emotional, linguistical, interactive) used by the creators of ASMR content published on video sharing social media platforms, mainly YouTube, to establish affective connection with the audience in terms of fostering the feeling of intimacy, enhancing user's mood and wellbeing, improving user's sleep quality, and providing user with helpful and convenient digital tool for self-care.

 

Numerous techniques and modalities utilized by the ASMR artists in the videos, e.g., highlighting the presence of technological interface, implementing non-human and posthuman viewpoints, roles, and perspectives, and employing fragmentary and non-linear narratives, were identified throughout the project. Such strategies were recognized as being based on the interplay between various factors, including aesthetic, affective, and epistemological ones, in which artist-creator, viewer-listener, technical equipment (cameras, microphones), and various accessories and props featured in a video take an active part.

 

Furthermore, the project determined that ASMR videos constitute a post-cinematic art form, in which a particular kind of sensibility called 'posthuman' is manifested and an emotional structure of 'post-cinematic affect' is revealed. Posthuman sensibility assumes that humans are only one element of a vast network of interconnected beings – and not by any means the most important one. This notion does not fill ASMR culture with anxiety but instead forms a source of relaxation for the ASMR community members who can experience a feeling of intimate interdependence of human and non-human beings. Post-cinematic affect is a specific emotional structure present in ASMR videos, related to the posthuman form of sensibility, and co-created through various post-cinematic techniques.

 

Overall, the research demonstrated that ASMR videos portray activities that are sonically and visually engaging, intimate in nature, appealing to the senses and stimulating the body, rather than being semantically relevant. Sounds and visuals interacting affectively with the body of the viewer-listener of ASMR video play a key role in the construction of a multimodal experience of the surrounding reality which is symptomatic for the person living in the twenty-first century. The project can stimulate debates in scientific environments revolving around affective aspects of media and touching on the multifaceted nature of intimacy in cultural discourses.

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