Transforming the Doctoral Defence: Remote-Access Technologies and Social Space

Abstract

Lockdowns and social distancing measures in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic have made remote participation a necessity for a wide range of social situations. This article examines one example: the abrupt transformation of the Finnish doctoral defence into a remote-access experience facilitated by video-conferencing technologies. The event is regularly centred on a formal public academic debate, rife with local academic ritual and ceremonial formality and firmly tied to the assumption of physical co-presence in the material space. Following the tradition of spatial conceptualisations of the digital, we draw inspiration from Henri Lefebvre’s theory on the production of space, particularly the analytical framework of the spatial triad, which enables regarding the doctoral defence as a social space made up of relations between things. As remote-access tools are introduced, new actants enter the field; the relations they mediate are affected, as is the social space that the relations constitute. This facilitates the examination of the effects that remote-access technologies have on conceiving, perceiving and living the doctoral defence, and ultimately on the social space as holistically understood. Our analysis is based on observations of remote-access defences and interviews with doctoral candidates who defended their doctoral theses remotely. Our findings highlight how the social space of the defence is both curtailed and broadened by remote-access technologies; some relations that make up space are narrowed while others stretch sufficiently to be included. As a result, the remote-access defence conceptually counts as the real thing in our material, but it remains unsatisfactory as an experience. This finding suggests how to mediate social space without reducing it: focusing on the lived experience and ensuring that it is not inadvertently distorted.

1 Introduction

Due to the social distancing measures and lockdowns prompted by the rapid global spread of COVID-19, time spent at home increased suddenly and dramatically for many. This caused an abrupt and involuntary move from the physical into the digital sphere: as people started to live, work and socialize remotely, they became increasingly dependent on the digital media to function (Risi et al., 2020). In a potentially significant development for the future of communication (Vlassis, 2021), remote participation turned into the primary means of social interaction outside the household. This created new pathways into our private lives by transforming private and even intimate domestic spaces into focal sites of work and sociality (Hardley and Richardson, 2021). The pandemic turned endeavours as variable as commemorating (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2021), teaching (Grandinetti, 2021), caring (Gunasekeran et al., 2021) and experiencing new places with locals (Norum and Polson, 2021) into something to be partaken from a distance via online platforms, video streams and teleconferencing.

From a historical perspective, these developments can be viewed as simply a continuation or an acceleration of the social relevance of media technologies, as broadly discussed under the heading of mediation (e.g., Couldry and Hepp, 2017; Livingstone, 2009). Furthermore, it would be mistaken to claim that these forms of sociality were untouched by mediation before the pandemic and became suddenly mediated; arguably, media had already affected the sense-making of social reality, the organization of social space, and the construction of social knowledge (Couldry and Hepp, 2017; Jansson, 2013). However, the suddenness of the lockdown measures necessitated the use of remote participation technologies for interactions typically based on physical co-presence. Our research for this article began from a simple observation: something seemed to happen when forms of sociality were, by necessity, moved online. They simultaneously manifested as remote-access versions of something occurring in the material space and were experientially disconnected from it. The disconnect appears to have to do with expectations that are firmly tied to material space as a setting, with vivid examples including remote participation in ceremonial events such as mourning the dead (Li, 2020; Uriu et al., 2021).

This article focuses on one mediated and remotely accessed space of a ceremonial nature: the Finnish doctoral defence. In Finland, the defence is a public examination of academic merit and the culmination of a multi-year PhD process. It is also a ritual marking the defendant’s passage into the academic community and is invariably performed in the same way. The event is centred on a formal public disputation between the doctoral candidate acting as the defendant and their opponent. It is chaired by the relevant faculty’s appointed custos and attended by members of the academic community, the defendant’s family and the general public. Usually, the event takes place in an auditorium and is understood in terms of physical co-presence and proceedings occurring in the material space: it involves ceremonial corporeal and discursive acts, a formal dress code, academic insignia and the weight of the social norms of local academic tradition. The travel restrictions and social distancing measures imposed in the wake of the pandemic meant that doctoral defences were organised with video-conferencing technologies. Interactions between the key participants now took place remotely from homes or university premises, and the event was made public by means of a video stream. One Finnish university began referring to this practice as a ‘remote-access doctoral defence’, a term we adopt in this article.

We examine how remote participation technologies reconfigure social spaces by using Finnish remote-access doctoral defences as an empirical case. We focus on the subjective viewpoint of the defendant, basing our discussion on interviews with doctoral candidates who had undergone remote-access defences during the COVID-19 lockdown and on our observations of defences during the same period. Analytically, we draw inspiration from the socio-spatial theory of French philosopher and sociologist Henri Lefebvre (1974/1991) and from the actor-network theory (ANT; Latour, 2005). Lefebvre considers space as a setting of sociality to be a social product. It is constituted not merely by material things but also by relations between those things and comes into existence when it is included in sociality. The theory incorporates the notion of the spatial triad, which we employ to analyse the co-production of the social space of the defence. ANT enters the discussion as we examine how remote-access technologies participate in enacting the space of sociality. When social space is accessed remotely, new actants (in ANT terms) enter the field. They might behave as intermediaries or mediators. As Bruno Latour (2005: 39) points out, an intermediary ‘transports meaning or force without transformation’. Mediators, on the other hand, ‘transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry’. We argue that remote-access technologies can adopt either form, but in the case of Finnish doctoral defences, they end up affecting relations between things and thus social space.

The next section presents our analytical approach in more detail, focusing on the notion of social space. After a foray into our data collection and analytical methods, we present our findings, analytically separated along the triad’s dimensions. We then tie the findings together and discuss the production of remote-access social space. The final section foregrounds what our findings suggest about mediating social space.

2 Remote-Access Social Spaces

When remotely constituted sociality is considered, the question of how to approach technologies that ‘replace social distance with mediated proximity’ arises (Ebbrecht-Hartmann, 2021: 1108). Marvin Minsky (1980) outlined one option decades ago: ‘The biggest challenge to developing telepresence is achieving that sense of “being there”. Can telepresence be a true substitute for the real thing?’ (p. 48). Minsky envisioned technologies that would make the experience of remote presence so similar to physical experience that there would be no noticeable difference. Since then, research has explored technological means to make ‘being there’ increasingly convincing: live video (de Greef and Ijsselsteijn, 2001), multiple video views (Cutler et al., 2002), visual depth information (Nakanishi et al. 2009) and physical surrogates (Tang et al., 2013). However, even the most advanced technologies provide a remote presence that is obviously different from physical presence in terms of experience and the senses.

A different approach that is not focused on mediated presence as a technological feature can be formulated by asking not how to ‘be there’ but what constitutes ‘there’ in the first place. It underlies considerations of the spatial nature of the digital sphere, such as conceiving the internet as cyberspace (Adams, 1997) or examining the spatial organization of virtual collaboration (Dourish, 2006; Harrison and Dourish, 1996). The approach culminates in the notion that what people do in the digital sphere is constitutive of social space, so that ‘cyberspace is not where these relations take place, it is the “where” enacted by these relations’ (Nunes, 2006: 28, as cited in Proctor, 2021: 595). The point is not that the ‘virtual’ should be set apart from the ‘physical’ but rather that when technologies replace social distance with mediated proximity, they do not merely convey information and meaning between participants but co-constitute new spaces of sociality.

The epistemological point of departure is to move beyond mere spatial metaphors and to consider the digital sphere spatial in the sense that people occupy it in the course of social practices (Proctor, 2021). Lefebvre’s (1974/1991) theory on the production of space speaks directly to this approach. Space, in his language, refers to the socially constructed setting of sociality; it is both central to our lived experience of the world and fundamentally bound up with social reality. Spaces are co-constituted by material factors, people’s experiences and social relations, so that the material aspect of space is an integral factor of social practice; simultaneously, ‘spaces come into existence when they are included in some sort of sociality’ (Proctor, 2021: 598). For Lefebvre (1974/1991), then, all spaces are always socially produced: ‘a space is not a thing, but rather a set of relations between things’ (p. 83).

The analytical strength of Lefebvre’s framework comes from the notion of the spatial triad. Its distinction between three dimensions that together produce space enables an understanding of the complexities of social life in various settings, ranging from a theatre company’s performance of Shakespeare’s Richard III (Watkins, 2005) to digitally mediated spaces: virtual reality in museums (Parker & Saker, 2020), the gig economy (Newlands, 2021), platformed hospitality spaces (Farmaki et al., 2020), geolocation tagging (Yılmaz and Kocabalkanlı, 2021) and digital navigation (Chesher, 2012). Though we strive not to oversimplify Lefebvre’s multi-layered theory – against which many caution (e.g., Kingma et al., 2018) – social space can be said to be co-produced by mental representations of space, sensory inputs about the concrete materiality of space and the subjective experience of space. While viewpoints and naming conventions abound (e.g., Proctor, 2021; Schmid, 2008; Watkins, 2005), for this article, we take an approach rooted in people’s experience and call the three interconnected processes constituting social space the conceived, the perceived and the lived space (Lefebvre, 1974/1991: 33, 38–39).

The conceived space refers to the aspect of a space that is apprehended by thought, such as abstract mental spaces formulated by experts as technical representations. Spatial conceptions – descriptions, plans, scripts, procedures and theories – have defining capabilities; they are related to designing and establishing spaces beforehand. These abstract conceptions of space are generated for a purpose that is not necessarily to neutrally describe space. Nevertheless, people treat conceptual representations of space as if they were objectively real.

The perceived space refers to the aspect of space that is out in the open, presented to and grasped by the human senses. It denotes embodied reality as perceived by humans. This is the aspect of space that is directly related to materiality and physicality: it consists of the observable dimensions of social interaction. As conceived purposes inform perceptions of space and perceptions in turn reinforce and reproduce conceptions, these two aspects of space mutually co-produce one another (e.g., Proctor, 2021).

The lived space refers to the subjective and informal experience of social space by its users or inhabitants. While subjective, the lived space is, according to Lefebvre, co-produced by the mental conceptions of space and the sensory perceptions of it, which are usually in tension with one another. The lived experience of space is, in other words, ‘our understanding of the simultaneously real-and-imagined space which we deal with’ (Kingma et al., 2018: 4).

The three dimensions are equally important in the sense that they are all constitutive elements of social space. They are analytically separable, and this separation is the source of the usefulness of the framework, but their interconnection is nevertheless what makes it ‘possible to surface the true potentiality of Lefebvre’s theory’ (Watkins, 2005: 214). The spatial dimensions come together to constitute social life, so it would be a mistake to try to isolate them from one another. Therefore, transformations of social space can also be properly understood only by accounting for all three dimensions and their interrelations (Jansson, 2013).

Our analytical approach leads us to consider the remote doctoral defence as social space constituted by ‘a set of relations between things’ (Lefebvre, 1974/1991: 83). The space does not emerge from technology: like other remote-access forms of sociality, the remote defence is ‘firmly situated within, motivated by, and shaped in response to everyday life’ (Dourish, 2006: 304); it reflects expectations of what a doctoral defence is and should be. Technologies nevertheless act as participants in these relations. In terms of the spatial triad, the social space of the defence is co-produced by definitions and concepts about a doctoral defence, the sensory perceptions of it, and the subjective experience of living it. We first analytically separate the three dimensions and then consider how they come together to co-produce social space, simultaneously assessing how remote-access technologies act as intermediaries and mediators of the relations they co-constitute.

3 Material and Method

Our research material consists of interviews and observations. We interviewed 18 defendants who had undergone remote-access doctoral defences between mid-March and May 2020: a public examination of their doctoral theses in which interaction between the defendant and the opponent occurred over video-conferencing technologies. The interviewees were chosen using purposive sampling (Silverman, 2006: 306–307), in order to capture as wide a variety of remote-access defence experiences as possible. First, the defendants had disciplinary backgrounds ranging from biomedicine and geosciences to organization studies and the humanities. Our respondents have differences in age, gender and nationality. Lastly, we made sure our respondents had experienced varied remote-access configurations; some had defended from home and others from dedicated university auditoriums. Similarly, their custodes were either at home or on university premises, and the opponents participated remotely, either from a domestic environment or their offices. Some defendants had a small physically co-present audience, while others had only a remote audience. Finally, technical setups varied: there was either one video conference in which everyone participated, or a closed video conference for the disputation and a separate public video stream. The video and audio setups ranged from professional audio-visual capacities in dedicated auditoriums to headsets and laptop cameras at home.

In addition to interviewing defendants, we interviewed a university IT professional who had supported dozens of remote-access defences by the time we spoke. Our purpose was to obtain an external view of the defence space other than our own to gain insight into how the space of the defence was planned and carried out.

The 19 interviews averaged about an hour each, were conducted remotely in either Finnish or English and were recorded and transcribed by the authors, who translated Finnish quotations into English for publication. All informants were given pseudonyms that identify them below.

The topic guideline of the semi-structured interviews revolved around questions about interviewees’ ideas of the remote-access defence in general and their observations and experiences of their own defences. Although the guideline ended up being consistent with this article’s theoretical approach, it was actually informed by our other main data source, which consisted of direct observations (over a video stream) of 44 doctoral defences at Finnish universities. We aimed to interview defendants whose defences we had already observed. In addition, we had our own insights into doctoral defences, remote or otherwise: the first author defended via remote participation during the lockdown, while the second had conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork at the University of Helsinki.

Our first round of analysis involved open classification of the material that was guided not by theoretical perspectives but instead by the following question: ‘What is relevant for the experience of a remote-access defence?’ This led us to the observation that our informants’ experiences were conditioned by their observations of the physically co-present space and the mediated aspects of space elsewhere and by their existing notions of what a defence entails. This interplay between sensory perceptions and mental conceptions suggested an analytical framework based on Lefebvre’s spatial triad. In the second round of analysis, we iterated the classification based on that triad, which is how the results are presented in the following sections.

4 Remote-Access Technologies and the Spatial Triad

4.1 ‘The Day I Had Waited for so Long Would go Differently’

The defendants’ understandings of the remote-access defence are modelled primarily against the backdrop of their conceptions of a regular defence; most had spent years imagining the day and – having attended numerous defences – had developed a relatively firm idea about it. The university guidelines on remote-access defences, which were tweaked throughout spring 2020 based on experience, also encouraged keeping up the traditions. University IT staff initially had only a few days to figure everything out, and simply emulating those aspects of a regular defence that were feasible in the remote setting presented itself as a clear solution.

According to the protocol, a regular doctoral defence consists of a public examination of the thesis and non-official activities, including the post-examination dinner party known as a karonkka. While only the public examination is strictly necessary, the non-official activities form an integral part of the day and are extremely rarely omitted; indeed, some Finnish universities even provide detailed instructions for organising them. The public examination officially starts with the defendant, the custos and opponent ceremonially entering the auditorium. Once the key figures assume their places on the podium, the custos stands up to introduce the defendant and opponent and declares the public examination open. The defendant then presents a 20-minute introductory lecture (lectio praecursoria), which is followed by the opponent’s brief initial statement; both are delivered standing up. The longest part of the examination comprises the dispute between the opponent and the defendant; the end of that exchange is marked by the opponent’s final statement. There is a potential but rarely realized opportunity for the audience to intervene before the custos declares the public examination completed. The defendant, the custos and the opponent then ceremonially exit the auditorium.

Many defendants had already started organising their defence days when the COVID-19 outbreak upended their plans. This understandably triggered a sense of loss, as Pinja recalled:

I remember when I watched the government’s info session, sitting in the living room and crying. That was the moment I had to relinquish the idea [of having a regular defence]. The day I had waited for so long would go differently.

Finnish universities initially suggested that doctoral candidates postpone their defences to autumn, on the assumption that the situation would be resolved by then. Our defendants were aware that others had taken that path, not wanting ‘to end it all on Zoom’, as Ingrid put it. Jaakko told us that he weighed his decision for a while. Postponing, however, was not an option for many, whether for professional or personal reasons. A few considered the defence a nuisance and were happy with the change: Ingrid, for example, thought that all the real work was done, and even told her custos right before the defence that it was time ‘to quit this circus’.

There were some changes to the conceptions of the public examination in the remote setting. For instance, a regular defence would usually be held on Friday or Saturday at noon, but this proved impossible as the number of remote-access defences grew. The limited number of technicians might end up assisting with as many as nine defences in a single day, so defences soon had to be distributed throughout the week, often held at unusual hours to accommodate the opponent’s time zone and limited technological resources. Likewise, a remote-access defence was understood to have a much wider audience than a regular one, stretching across different locations, and incorporating 90-year-old grandmothers, PhD funders and potential employers who, the defendants were certain, would not have attended otherwise.

Nonetheless, the PhD defence was still understood as a public event. The defendants were required to advertise the defence, which was also posted in the university’s events calendar. The importance of the public component was perhaps best illustrated by a glitch that Juho encountered. On his way to the university auditorium, Juho realized that information about his defence, and the Zoom link to it, had disappeared from the calendar. Apparently, after 2:00 pm the university calendar stopped displaying events later that day, as was the case with Juho’s defence. This was a software glitch about which neither Juho nor tech support could do anything. However, it did not go unnoticed by remote observers like us or by Juho’s professors, who started sending him urgent messages just before the defence, asking him for the link, and reminding him that the defence was a public event.

In addition, the remote-access defence was considered as much a ritual as the regular one. This became clear to defendants through conversations with the custos regarding the proceedings. In all cases, the regular defence’s dress code was to be followed. The remote-access version was also to have all the elements laid out in the university’s instructions: custos’s opening, lectio praecursoria, opponent’s opening statement, debate, the opponent’s closing statement, questions from the audience and custos’s closing. These parts are so clearly defined that when we occasionally had to switch between different Zoom calls to follow overlapping defences, we were immediately able to determine the stage of the public examination which we had joined.

Speech acts, in both regular and remote settings, marked the transition between different segments, and many of our respondents wrote appropriate lines to ensure that they uttered them correctly. Corporeal acts, however, become negotiable in the remote-access defences, being most explicitly tied to technological affordances. As Tuomas recounted, ‘the classic entrance with the audience standing up and so on was left out. We were joking that it would be ridiculous to do the walk-in with a camera on’.

In some cases, however, the regular public examination proceedings were emulated to the finest detail, including the ceremonial walk-in, and other corporeal acts. Lucija shared her experience:

[The custos] gave us an outline of how things were going to proceed. [...] Please stand at this time, sit down at this time and so on. [...] He told us that even if this was via Zoom, he would like us to stand when it was customary in the defence.

By enacting a different ‘where’ of a defence, remote-access technologies also conceptually detached the defence location from convention and tradition, with ambivalent results. Several interlocutors mentioned that they had expected to defend from their own campus, which was often impossible. With the number of defences increasing and limited tech support, one university, for instance, decided to concentrate all defences on one campus. Jenni told us that she chose to attend her defence from home once she learned of this arrangement, while Emma said that she did not mind being on a different campus because she had started elementary school two decades earlier only a few hundred metres away, so ending her formal education nearby felt appropriate.

While the effects on conceptions of the public examination part were mostly subtle, the activities preceding it were completely reconfigured. In the regular setting, these activities provide an opportunity for the defendant and opponent to get to know each other. In the remote setting, they served primarily as a space to exchange information about the official protocol and to test and become familiar with the technologies involved. The same was true of post-examination activities that normally serve to initiate the new member into the academic community and strengthen ties with the opponent. In the new circumstances, post-examination activities were no longer on the agenda, effectively bracketed from the remote-access space. Now, brief verbal exchanges right after the examination, often in the same virtual meeting room, took the place of interactions during the coffee reception, post-examination lunch and karonkka included in a regular defence. Instead of organising a dinner to honour the opponent, defendants now just exchanged emails with them or arranged small gifts to be sent.

4.2 ‘Suddenly, I Could See my Grandma’s Face on the Screen’

The perceptions of the remote-access defence space preceding the public examination were shaped mostly by testing the connection and the video, audio, and software functionalities. These checks would initially occur well in advance, since defendants would often send anxious messages to tech support as soon as their defence date was set. However, as people became more familiar with video-conferencing software during the spring, such messages became less common. Still, at least a check immediately before the public part was included. Many defendants mentioned noticing on those occasions how their colleagues, relatives, and friends started appearing online. This would not be the case in the regular setting, where the defendant would not see anyone in the audience before entering the auditorium. It also meant that sometimes the audience gained an unprecedented view behind the curtains just before showtime.

During the examination itself, the video-conferencing software showed only active participants. While the audience is continuously present in the regular setting, they now disappeared from the defendant’s view. None of our respondents experienced malevolent disruptions known as ‘Zoombombing’ (Brown, 2020), although the IT interlocutor told us that such incidents did happen. The defendants did, nonetheless, perceive occasional incidental interruptions that were more noticeable in comparison to a cough or a sneeze in the regular auditorium. As Jouni noted, ‘in the middle of it some people joined in, and the tech person needed to disable their camera [because] suddenly, I could see my grandma’s face on the screen’.

Likewise, the custos—a prominent if largely passive figure in a regular defence—now completely disappeared from the view of both defendant and audience. If a custos were not in the same physical location as the defendant, the active speaker view completely hid them. Even in the same room, the custos was rendered invisible by screen arrangements, in which the opponent typically appeared right before the defendant, and captured their full attention. Occasionally, after initially appearing in front of the camera, the custos would even sit elsewhere, walking back into the screen view only for their part at the end.

The opponent, on the other hand, became much more conspicuous to defendants in the remote setting than in the regular one. Birgitta mentioned a strong gesticulation that dominated the opponent’s video, resulting in her receiving some funny screenshots from her colleagues afterwards. She also mentioned the loud sound of the opponent pouring water into a glass. All defendants told us something about the opponent’s surroundings, distinguishing between whether they were at their university, in a home office or elsewhere.

The materiality of the defendant’s physical location unsurprisingly shaped their perception of space, but it also enabled and disabled actions in the remote setting. Of all the remote participation technologies, the camera had particular importance, as it set temporal boundaries for the defence. For instance, Birgitta, who walked to the podium at the beginning, said she felt the defence began only once she was visible to the camera. Those who walked out from the camera perimeter reported a similar effect. A number of those who did not march onto the screen only turned on the camera at the beginning and switched it off at the end. Some of our respondents received this advice from the tech personnel, who were gradually developing a sense of best practices. Finally, those who did nothing in particular – simply sitting in front of a switched-on camera prior to the beginning and remaining in the same position after the defence was declared over – described feeling uncertain about precisely when the ceremony began and ended.

The camera also gave spatial boundaries to the defence by making some parts of the physical space visible and hiding others. The defendants were acutely aware of this. Antti, who completed his PhD in mathematics, described the importance of arranging the camera to face the blackboard so he could use it during the defence, which is the custom in that field. Several mentioned the care with which they placed objects in the camera’s view, making sure that the custos’s ceremonial doctor’s top hat was visible. Finally, those who defended their PhDs from home told us about how they exploited the limits of visibility that the camera entailed to play with their attire. Anni, for instance, wore wacky socks and shoes while being otherwise formally dressed.

Finally, the camera position also affected the defendant–opponent relationship. This was especially prominent for those who defended from the university’s premises and often had the camera set up separately from the screen displaying the opponent. During the ‘behind-the-scenes’ view of Sofia’s defence, we heard her checking with the opponent whether it was alright if she did not look forward, where the camera was positioned, but to the side, as that was where the opponent’s face would appear to her. Emma told us that during her check-up, the opponent asked whether the video could be taken from the camera on the computer on which Emma was joining the call rather than the large camera further away so that the opponent could see her expressions. Since that did not pan out, Emma told us she made sure to make ‘big expressions’ during the defence, hoping the opponent would perceive them.

Other technical components enabling the defence were mostly invisible. The Internet connection and the audio setup came occasionally to prominence, and then only due to their flaws. While many faced minor connectivity issues, for a few it became a defining feature of how they perceived their defence. Elias, for instance, found out on his way to the defence venue that the university’s broadband had failed. While this was addressed by using a mobile hotspot, the inferiority to a broadband connection remained noticeable.

Making the defence public via a separate video stream, a practice adopted for a time due to Zoombombing concerns, turned out to be particularly inadequate. While these sometimes affected all parties at a defence, they always impacted the audience. For instance, while Lucija, her custos and her opponent had no problems interacting, those of us watching online had trouble with the audio from the outset. The audio completely failed at one point, but the defence continued because the key participants remained unaware of the problem. Even in cases without such concrete problems, the fact that there was an approximately one-minute delay in the video stream caused a disconnect with those following the defence remotely that became particularly noticeable in the segment for audience questions.

Remote-access technologies also played an important role in the activities following the public examination. They enabled interactions with the audience, who would in some cases turn on their cameras and microphones after the formal proceedings had finished. When this happened, the perceived defence space would be expanded to include the immediate surroundings of homes, offices, and even outdoor locations.

4.3 ‘Doing it Remotely was Fine Defence-Wise—But it was a Bit Sad Afterwards’

As might be expected when publicly defending years of personal intellectual commitment, the lived experience prior to the disputation was marked largely by anxiety. An additional layer of anxiety was, however, related specifically to remote-access technologies. As Tuulikki explained, a technical breakdown was on her list of top concerns, along with the health conditions of the key actors. Technical glitches hindering interaction with the opponent were also feared. Several defendants admitted anxieties about Zoombombing, while some expressed discomfort with the university’s choice of teleconferencing software or nervousness about hitting the wrong button.

Remote-access technologies left a similarly significant mark on defendants’ lived experience of the examination itself. Those who defended from home had an unexpectedly relaxed morning before the event but were suddenly pulled in. Regardless of location, most experienced the opening and ending as awkward. The ceremonial elements of a regular disputation provide something for defendants to lean on, and corporeal acts – which now became optional – seem to play a particularly important role. Those who strictly followed the regular script, such as Lucija, generally had a better experience:

I first considered it a bit foolish to [...] stand up and sit down by myself at home. But it did add to the feeling that this is a defence, and this is something ceremonial that is happening.

Awkwardness remained during the lectio praecursoria, especially if a defendant had no co-present audience. The debate with the opponent, however, was largely experienced positively, on par with or even more immersive than expectations about a face-to-face debate. Some mentioned how seeing the opponent at home contributed to feeling more relaxed. Nevertheless, the lack of previous ties with the opponent, which in a regular defence occurred through activities preceding the public examination, made an impression, as Mei noted:

We had difficulties understanding each other. [...] It might have made a difference if I had met the opponent on the previous day to get used to his style. [We were] halfway through the defence before I realized that I had to wait until he was really done before responding.

The experience of the audience was also reconfigured. While there are norms and expectations about who appears in the auditorium at a regular defence, this changed with an online event advertised on the university website and social media. However, the experience was mostly positive, as a much wider desirable audience could now be welcomed. The fact that the remote audience completely disappeared from the defendant’s view brought an unexpected relief to those less comfortable with public speaking. When there was a local audience, they contributed to a dignified experience through their formal clothing. For a defence from home, a physically present audience could be erased altogether, as Lucija recounted:

My partner was in the other room; there was no audience in that sense. We were entertaining the thought that he could sit on the other side of the desk so I would have someone to look at, but we decided against that because it seemed too silly.

The immersive experience was occasionally interrupted by technical glitches, which were not always negative: Jianyu, for instance, mentioned that they gave him extra time to formulate his responses. Sofia, whose video failed in the middle of the defence but who persevered with an audio-only feed, said she felt much more relaxed after becoming invisible.

As described above, the initial responses to the remote-access public examination were predominantly negative. This changed significantly after our informants had gone through the defence. Despite the public examination being altered in many ways, the experience nevertheless counted as the same thing, as Pinja put it: ‘It is just as valuable and just as genuine and valid a disputation irrespective of being realized in this manner. In the end, nothing is taken away from the content’.

The experience of post-defence activities, however, changed dramatically. While several of our respondents were able to conjure some of the celebratory feelings by opening a teleconference for toasting or sharing a drink with the small local audience, those who defended from home felt the difference particularly acutely. Lucija, for example, said, ‘doing it remotely was fine defence-wise—but it was a bit sad afterwards. Because afterwards I’ve been kind of alone’. Also, the cut with the opponent felt very abrupt, as Anni recalled:

I felt surprised by those critical closing remarks; they were not balanced with the merits of the work. Normally, this would be softened by small talk with the opponent, but now I just got the written statement.

As far as we could notice, many opponents shared these feelings of abruptness. In one defence we followed, the opponent even said so explicitly. After a very lively debate, the sudden cut appeared to leave him disoriented.

The omission of the karonkka dinner ended up being a major reason for negative feelings, both a priori and a posteriori. The IT person we interviewed said that many of the defendants he assisted had mentioned how much they regretted not having the opponent on site and the post-examination festivities. These sentiments also prevailed among our interlocutors, as Anni indicated: ‘I had expected it to be my special day, but this was not the case at all. [...] I really wanted to have karonkka on the same day; it would have been the culmination’.

All in all, the lack of ceremonial festivities following the public examination coloured the overall defence experience. In Eero’s words, ‘you sit in front of the computer for two hours and then you are a PhD, not really, but de facto. It feels a bit silly’.

5 Mediators and Intermediaries of Social Space

Our analytical separation of the social space of the doctoral defence along the triadic dimensions has enabled our analysis of the complexities of the situation. It has made clear that remote-access technologies affect all three dimensions of the social space. They contribute to certain conceptions of the defence and not others. They make some perceptions about the defence space prominent, while other aspects are largely hidden from the senses or cut off completely. Their introduction also alters subjective lived space. This analytical effort is, however, an attempt to ‘dissect that which Lefebvre has insisted must be considered as a whole’ (Watkins, 2005: 214). We now bring the triadic dimensions together in order to discuss how remote-access technologies affect the relations that constitute social space in a holistic sense. We organise our discussion along the themes of spatial boundaries, the relations between the triadic dimensions of space and the dual role of remote-access technologies as new actants in the field.

The effect of remote-access technologies on the defence space is most clearly observed in our material in terms of spatial boundaries: the relations that are included in and thus constitute the space. Here, two opposing processes of reconfiguration are at work. On the one hand, remote-access technologies expand spatial boundaries by including new sites of interactions and effectively broadening the defence’s potential and actual audiences. As a result, new relations that would not have otherwise existed are entailed. On the other hand, remote-access technologies contract the defence space by cutting out some of the relations that were supposed to be there; those that were ill suited for mediation were put under pressure with the introduction of remote-access technologies. Among the relations that broke under that pressure were, notably, whole sites of interaction regularly included in the defence, especially those occurring before and after the scripted formal proceedings. In our material, these would often be omitted or completely transformed. For many defendants, what was originally expected to be a day-long defence event centred around the formal proceedings was replaced by a remote-access defence consisting solely of those proceedings.

Some of the relations that did survive the pressure of mediation and were thus included inside the defence’s spatial boundaries were more subtly reconfigured. These reconfigurations reveal how relations and thus the social space are cast into a form that can be mediated. The perceived space, for example, was reduced to the portion captured and made available to the senses by remote-access technology, with everything visible on the video stream gaining unprecedented prominence. In practical terms, interactions between some actors became even more intense than would be expected in a face-to-face situation. This happened at the expense of other actors, who were rendered largely invisible. The materiality of remote-access technologies also affected relations that carry spatial assumptions. For example, customary corporeal acts, including the walk-in to the auditorium or standing up on cue, were in many cases considered non-mediable and therefore altered. To borrow Davide Nicolini’s (2007) metaphor for practices that need altering when extended over distance by remote-access technologies, the acts and elements that make up the formal proceedings were ‘stretched out’, which represents ‘an expansion of the fabric and object of the activity’ (p. 914) and occurs when specific spatial assumptions play a constitutive role in sustaining the activity. In our case, conceptions of space carry the weight of assumptions about material space as the setting. Nevertheless, the walk-in may be stretched out and reconfigured into turning on the camera, as both represent the act of becoming perceivable to others in space. The physically co-present audience perceivable in an auditorium can be replaced by a list of names on the computer screen, which serves to make the space publicly accessible. This stretching out means elements of the doctoral defence can in effect remain conceptually intact. The resulting remote-access space can still ‘count as’ the doctoral defence, even if it is disconnected from the typical spatial assumptions.

However, the reconfigurations of relations, as we have demonstrated, did have significant impacts on defendants’ lived experience. Expansions of the remote-access defence space had a mostly positive effect, and the experience of the disputation was by and large on par with regular face-to-face interaction, or ‘just as valid’, as mediation did not adversely affect its contents. Conversely, the contractions of the social space had a profoundly negative impact on the experience of the defence as a social space, resulting in disappointment. This was partly due to the pandemic’s repercussions on sociality, reaching beyond the immediate effects of transition to digital interaction (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2021) and making the defence circumstances unusually burdensome. Nevertheless, the omission of events surrounding the formal proceedings resulted in what our informants described as a felt lack of closure. This indicates that the remote, stretched-out version of a defence can be accepted on a par with the original only if defendants’ lived experience is ignored. Elements of the regular defence that normally serve as venues of forming, maintaining and strengthening relations do not stretch out sufficiently to survive mediation, leading to a lived experience of the remote-access defence that was severely altered. In other words, the remote-access version of a defence counts as a ‘proper’ defence in a cold, technical sense that Lefebvre associates with conceptions of space (Lefebvre, 1974/1991). Mediation, then, affects relations that make up the space in a way that sets up an imbalance between conceptions of space and the lived experience; however, ‘it is necessary for the interactions between the triadic elements to be appropriate and in balance if an event was to be persuasive and effective’ (Watkins, 2005: 220).

This brings us to the relations between the triadic dimensions of space. For Lefebvre (1974/1991), how space is imagined and defined has dramatic consequences for how we experience it. In fact, he considers the lived space to be passively experienced; it is the ‘dominated [...] space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate’ (p. 39). While conceptions cannot dictate perception or subjective experience, how space is defined or imagined nevertheless exercises power over experience: according to Lefebvre, the ‘social space of lived experience gets crushed and vanquished by an abstract conceived space [...] what is lived and perceived is of secondary importance compared to what is conceived’ (Merrifield, 2006: 175, as cited in Newlands, 2021: 727). Accordingly, the production of social space is to be understood as a struggle in which conceptions subdue the other two aspects. Therefore, the social world is, according to Lefebvre, dominated by abstract experts who are removed from people’s lived experience.

When the experience of the remote-access defence was unsatisfactory but still had to count as the real thing suggests that the lived space is subordinated to abstract conceptions. Researchers interrogating digitally mediated spaces, however, offer an opposing perspective: digital media can open new abstract relationships to space that in fact operate more closely to lived experience than conceptions (Chesher, 2012) and can arguably allow for actions stemming from a desire to improve lived experience which might work against seemingly all-powerful abstract conceptions and result in changes in the perceived space (Proctor, 2021). A similar claim can be made on the basis of our material: even as the introduction of remote-access technologies narrowed the defence space, defendants also made use of those same technologies to make their experience more satisfactory. These repairs and fixes were not experienced as ‘the same’ as the regular relations, nor was this necessarily their purpose; instead of maintaining a social space, they made an admittedly diminished experience more bearable.

However, rather than a general claim about the effect of remote-access technologies on the relations between different dimensions of the spatial triad, our empirical case suggests their impact depends on context and is tied to the dual role of remote-access technologies, which can act as either mediators or intermediaries. In his foundational work on ANT, Bruno Latour (2005: 38) is adamant: ‘it makes a huge difference whether the means to produce the social are taken as intermediaries or as mediators’. Distinguishing between mediators and intermediaries thus offers an approach to understanding the effect of remote-access technologies on social space. In our empirical case, it explains why the video-conferencing software and the camera play such an important role in the conception, perception and experience of the Finnish doctoral defence. These, it becomes clear, play a role of mediators. Their input, Latour (2005) argues, ‘is never a good predictor of their output; their specificity has to be taken into account every time’ (p. 39). The specificity in this case most importantly pertains to their effect on the lived experience of space. Other remote participation technologies, such as internet connections, microphones and speakers, play a role closer to intermediaries. As such, they are predominantly invisible to the defence participants. This, however, changes if problems with their functioning arise, which is not surprising since they might be considered as spatial infrastructure that only becomes truly noticeable when it breaks down (Star, 1999). This is also true when such elements shift from being intermediaries to acting as mediators, start directly shaping the social space of the defence and become fundamental to the lived experience.

6 Conclusion

As the pandemic settled in, digital technologies became more and more constitutive of sociality, transforming many previously co-present social situations into remote-access experiences. Moving forward, regardless of how the pandemic develops, it seems likely that this process will continue, at least to some extent. While we may already be accustomed to the often unfulfilling and at times even dehumanising experience of remote sociality, a critical task for social scientists is to prevent a premature closure of possibilities (Nicolini, 2007) and to continue asking how to mediate specific social spaces without reducing them.

The analysis in this article suggests one starting point: remote-access social space is constituted by transformed relations between things, which means that they are not simply remotely accessed versions of the original space but rather transformed spaces in their own right. While the followers of Marvin Minsky’s (1980) vision will undoubtedly continue efforts to develop more convincing means of accessing physical spaces remotely, the inherent premise in such efforts is that we can adhere to the spatial assumptions innate in the forms of sociality and keep technologically reducing the need to stretch out practices based on those assumptions. However, aiming to simply create remote-access social spaces that manage to ‘count as’ the physical spaces they replace risks producing remote-access versions that are cold and technical representations of what was once familiar. Focusing on the role technologies play as intermediaries and mediators enables us to distinguish between those aspects of sociality that are simply transported and those that are ultimately transformed—and following Latour (2005: 40), it is a rare exception to find truly faithful intermediaries. Finding Minsky’s ‘true substitute for the real thing’, then, would start from aiming not at resemblance to the physical experience but at a lived experience that is not inadvertently distorted by mediation.