Research Areas

Cyborg Anthropology, STS, Digital Afterlives, Science and Religion, New Religious Movements, Transhumanism

Fartein holds a M.A. in social anthropology from the University of Bergen. He has previously worked ethnographically in Iceland studying neopaganism. In his M.A. thesis, he examined how Modernity and technological developments have affected religious revivalism, particularly pagan revivalism, in Iceland and the Euro-American sphere in general. His current research interests include New Religious Movements, Science and Religion, Transhumanism, digital technologies and immortality.

As part of the larger research project Technoscientific Immortality: A study of Human Futures at the University of Bergen, Fartein is currently working on a PhD-project that examines the growing field of “digital immortality” technologies. The project deploys ethnographic fieldwork, both digital and physical, to examine how people conceive of and interact with technologies designed to simulate specific human personalities in the form of posthumous digital avatars.