Jason Archer

Biography

Dr. Jason Archer is an interdisciplinary scholar of communication, media, technology, and sensory studies. His research has developed along two overlapping tracks — haptic media studies and human-machine communication. His co-conceptualized the area of haptic media studies with David Parisi and Mark Paterson in a co-edited special issue of New Media and Society on Haptic Media in 2017. The area has continued to develop as an analog to visual and sound studies, tracing the histories, cultural and social developments, and technological normalizations shaping ideas, practices, and experiences of haptic media technologies and touch. He has recently published work in this area exploring emerging haptic holograms. He actively contributes research perspectives on robotics and touch to a growing international scholarly community focused on human-machine communication (HMC), with recent publications in the  Sage Handbook on Human-Machine Communication (2023) and Android, Assembled: The Explicit and Implicit Anatomy of Social Robots (Peter Lang, 2025).

He is currently working on three concurrent projects. (1) a book manuscript, The Robotic Surgeon Will See You Now: How Surgical Touch is Becoming Mediated and Why it Matters, where he examines how robotic touch became normalized in the operating room and why it matters for the future of surgery, (2) a book chapter, Grounding the Figure: Encounters of the Haptic Hologram Kind, which theorizes haptic holograms and emerging media technologies that resist existing categorization through a re-examination of McLuhan’s use of figure/ground and Flusser’s “groundlessness”, (3) a pedagogical project focused on reviewing syllabi and curricula in human-machine communication to explore the incorporation of critical and cultural perspectives meant to address (in)equities in research and teaching in an area of growing societal importance.

His has designed and taught undergraduate classes Human-Machine Communication, Interpersonal Communication and Technology, and Technology and Media, and has taught graduate courses New Media Theory and Philosophical Perspectives on Technology in the Rhetoric, Theory, and Culture program.