Virtual violence

Learn what is virtual violence and how do digital media alter violent practices and think about your digital practices, missed opportunities and unintended harms, including how your civic and reflective values show in online behavior.

← Back to courses
CIVIS focus area
Digital and Technological transformation
Open to
  • Bachelor's
  • Master's
  • PhD candidates/ students
Field of studies
  • Art, Design and Media
  • Computer Science and IT
  • Law
  • Social Science and humanities
Type
  • Blended Intensive Programmes (BIP)
Course dates
29 September - 7 November 2025
Apply by
4 May 2025 Apply now

Students will gain skills in critically reflecting on the panel topics, explaining phenomena of online violence they witness or document, predicting new and varied forms of resistance to virtual violence and interpreting how VR might change our everyday notions of humanity and conflict.

Aside from the physical component, the BIP involves 2 student conferences in hybrid format, conceived as follow-up where students could present their research projects; as well as online lectures from lecturers in non-CIVIS partnering universities and research institutes (in Romania, Belgium, Netherlands, Nigeria).

The BIP's physical component will include 5 days of classes hosted by the Faculty of Philosophy and the Rectorate building at the University of Bucharest. 

Main topics addressed

  • Virtual aggression-Experimental ethics in VR
  • Empathy enhancement, transformative experience/ misconceptions and ethical aspects
  • Virtual identities, consent and harm
  • Virtual ecology
  • VR Threats to Privacy and Autonomy 

Learning outcomes

Students will be empowered by attending this BIP to critically reflect upon the roles violence plays in VR, the new forms of violence VR engenders or makes possible, as well as new opportunities for mitigating violence, either specific to virtuality or make manifest by VR.

  • Identifying instances of virtual violence;
  • explaining possible sources of such VR violence;
  • predicting when such instances might occur and retrospectively explaining why they occurred as they did,
  • exploring new patterns of behavior specific to VR and augmented reality, as well as
  • blending social coordination in the real world with epistemic bubbles online

as as many skills students are likely to acquire and consolidate throughout participating in the BIP (critically reflecting on the panel topics, explaining phenomena of online violence they witness or document, predicting new and varied forms of resistance to virtual violence and interpreting how VR might change our everyday notions of humanity and conflict.) This involves both exploring culturally varied forms of violence in diverse societies, seeking to uncover methods for risk-mitigating virtual violence, through emerging moral norms and cultural institutions (Hub 2).

But the BIP also involves critically reflecting upon, and reassessing, the dimensions along which virtual reality digitally transforms our culturally entrenched patterns of behavior and interaction, in the allocation of power and moral standing and the configuration of moral space through the use of AI, robotics, augmented reality devices and machine learning in interaction with naive or conscientious users (Hub 5).

Dates: 29 September 2025 - 7 November 2025 Total workload: 100 hours
Format: Blended ECTS: 4*
Location: Bucharest, Romania Language: English (B2)
Contact: andrei.marasoiu@filosofie.unibuc.ro  

*recognition of ECTS depends on your home university

Physical mobility

The pshysical mobility section of the course will take place between 29 September - 3 October 2025, in Bucharest - Romania.

It will consist in face-to-face classes/ lab visits for 6h/ day (total of 30h), with a lunch break and a coffee break between the 3 daily 2h-slots) hosted by the Faculty of Philosophy and the Rectorate building at the University of Bucharest. Panels in the BIP, covered by its lecturers, will include:

  • counterfactual theories of virtual reality;
  • fictionalism vs. realism about virtual reality and virtual causation;
  • cultural representations of violence in the 20th-21st century;
  • theory of mind, empathy and social skills in virtual reality;
  • empathy in virtual reality;
  • virtual ecology, environmental (virtual ecology, environmental (in)justice perceived meanings: from affordances to what-might-have-beens;
  • attentive evaluation: ex ante / ex post stances, insight and autobiographical memory.

Virtual part

The virtual part will take pace between 13 October - 7 November 2025 and consists of 45h of online events held on Fridays and weekends, between 2:00 - 6:00 PM.

Virtual events will be Participation in one student conference (necessary to pass the class) presupposes writing a presentation/final essay which abides by the requirements set above, and writing which is estimated at 25h total of individual study (writing+preparation in the library, with experiments, surveys, etc).

Assessment

The BIP involves 2 student conferences in hybrid format, conceived as follow-up where students could present their research projects. Student overall projects (final essays) will follow these topic-neutral guidelines:

  1. Clearly and narrowly identify your chosen topic. 
  2. Formulate an unambiguous thesis about that topic. 
  3. Identify the public or academic debate within which your thesis is controversial and deserving of being supported. 
  4. Analyze the strongest argument in favor of your chosen view. 
  5. Present the most important objection or counterargument to your chosen view, and reply to it thoroughly. 
  6. Explain what is at stake in the debate – why are the topic and your thesis important? 
  7. Abide by the structure of an academic essay (introduction, contents structured in sections, conclusion) 
  8. Pick a citation style, and write your reference section and the footnotes in that citation style. See, e.g., https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/resources.html 
  9. Illustrate the theoretical views discussed with examples in daily life, contemporary research, of public concern, or all three. 
  10. Each essay must include at least four references, two in the last decade. The recommended length is between 7 and 15 pages (double-spaced, Times font)

This course is open to Bachelor's, Master's and PhD students at CIVIS member universities, interested in VR and/or violence and how they interact.

A B2 level of English is necessary. 

This CIVIS course is a Blended Intensive Programme (BIP) - a new format of Erasmus+ mobility which combines online teaching with a short trip to another campus to learn alongside students and professors across Europe.

NB: Visiting Students - Erasmus Funding Eligibility

To be eligible for your selected CIVIS programme, you must be a fully enrolled student at your CIVIS home university at the time you will be undertaking the programme. Applications for this course are only available for the 11 CIVIS member universities in Europe.

Partner universities

  • Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen (Germany)
  • University of Bucharest (Romania)
  • University of Glasgow (UK)

Professors:

Neil McDonnell – Professor of Philosophy and XR Technology at the University of Glasgow

Reinhard Kahle – 'Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker' Professor in the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Tübingen

Andrei Ionuţ Mărăşoiu – Lecturer and Vice-Chair of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Bucharest

Micah Thomas Pimaro Jr. – Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Calabar, Nigeria

Oana Şerban – Lecturer, Executive Director of the Center for Research in the History and Circulation of Ideas (CCIIF), Faculty of Philosophy, University of Bucharest

Anda Zahiu – Assistant Lecturer in the Faculty of Philosophy; researcher in the Center for Research in Applied Ethics (CCEA), University of Bucharest

Nathan Wildman – Assistant Professor, Tilburg Center in the Logic and Philosophy of Science (TILPS), Tilburg University

Sandra Cătălina Brânzaru – Associate in the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences; doctoral student in the Center for Logic, Philosophy and History of Science (CELFIS) within the Faculty of Philosophy; researcher in the Research Institute (ICUB) of the University of Bucharest

Send your application by filling in the online application form by 4 May 2025, and including:

  • a motivation letter
  • the level of english (According to CEFR)

The applications will be evaluated according to English level and interest in VR and/ or violence and how they interact.

Apply now

GDPR Consent

The CIVIS alliance and its member universities will treat the information you provide with respect. Please refer to our privacy policy for more information on our privacy practices. By applying to this course, you agree that we may process your information in accordance with these terms.