Diana Lengua is a philosopher working at the intersection of the sociology and history of science and technology. Her research examines how technology shapes human experience, and in particular the socio-political dimensions of algorithmic infrastructures and agency. She recently submitted her PhD thesis in the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex, and was a Visiting Researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge (Michaelmas 2025 – Easter 2026).

She holds a BA and MA in Philosophy from the University of Milan (110 cum Laude) and an MA in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths, University of London (Distinction). She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (AFHEA).

Her work has appeared in Media Theory, Computational Culture, and New Media & Society, and has been presented at venues including MIT, the British Science Festival, Trinity College Dublin, and the ACM Aarhus Conference. She has taught at the University of Exeter and the University of East London, and currently serves as External Examiner at the University of Portsmouth.

My research explores how presence — traditionally understood as a subjective illusion — is engineered and distributed by intelligent systems. Combining philosophical genealogy, media theory, and speculative design, I propose a framework for synthetic intersubjectivity, analysing avatars, affective AI, and extended reality platforms across immersive media, brain-computer interfaces, and the speculative imaginaire.

Publications

• Lengua, D. and Axelsson, M. (accepted). How to Detain a Robot: A Speculative Exploration through Design Fiction. Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR).
• Lengua, D. (under review). Cognitive Horizons: On Post-War Telepresence, and the Epistemology of Human-Machine Interaction Systems. History of Human Sciences.
• Lengua, D. and Sampson, T. (accepted, July 2026). From Ergonomics to Neurolabour: The Cognitive Architecture of Exploitation in the Age of Preintentional Neurocapitalism. In Turner, C., ed. The Ethics and Politics of Neuroenhancement. Berlin: De Gruyter.
• Lengua, D., Sampson, T. and Markelj, J. (in press, July 2026). On Modes of (Over)Stimulation: Editorial Introduction. Media Theory, Special Issue Stimulating Media: Cognitive and Sensory Approaches.
• Lengua, D. (in press, July 2026). Presence Without Consciousness: Media, Machines, and the Metaphysics of Synthetic Experience. Media Theory, Special Issue Stimulating Media.
• Lengua, D. (2025). SOMA: Stories from the Post-Cognitive Era. Proceedings of the Aarhus Conference: Computing X Crisis (AAR ‘25). ACM, New York. https://doi.org/10.1145/3744169.3744193
• Lengua, D. (2025). Review of Kemper, J. (2024). Frictionlessness. Bloomsbury Academic. Computational Culture: A Journal of Software Studies.
• Lengua, D. and Lengua, M. (2022). Moving towards digital lands: On processes of interaction in museums’ virtual spaces. In Meta.space: Visions of space from the Middle Ages to the Digital Age. Linz: OÖ Landes-Kultur GmbH.

• Lengua, D. & Axelsson, M. (2026). How to Detain a Robot: A Speculative Exploration through Design Fiction. Seminar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), sponsored by Radius and Disintegrator.
• Falling Out of Focus: On the unconscious architectures of digital fruition. British Science Festival, London, September 2024.
• The cataract surgery: Emerging perspectives in spatial computing and new dimensions of interaction. Screen Studies in the Age of Extended Reality and Synthetic Media, Trinity College Dublin, 2024.
• From Collective Hallucination to Neo-Somnambulistic Perceptual Act: Being half awake in virtual reality. The New Daydream Imaginary: On the Ethico-Aesthetics of Spontaneous Thought, School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, 2023.
• When the Virtual will Become only an Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response: On Immersive Neo Somnambulism, Avatar Without Legs, and User Experience Temporalities. MeCCSA 2023, Glasgow Caledonian University, 2023.
• Heuristics of Somatic Immersion. How to Study the Metaverse: Cognition, Embodiment and Experience in Immersive Worlds, University of East London Media Research Seminar, London, 2022.
• Fungible and non-fungible waste: On the problematic status of NFTs’ pervasiveness and use. DRHA: Digital Matters, Berlin, 2021.