Dayana Hristova is a Cognitive science PhD student from the University of Vienna (Austria) who will be visiting IMC in September and October 2019.

In her PhD project, she studies the reception of gamification in social media among adolescents. She applies ethnographic methods to study youths’ experience with Snapchat’s gamified elements as well as the social practices revolving around them. Together with her interdisciplinary team she is currently designing a mobile serious game for adolescents promoting awareness of social media related issues. She is a part of the #YouthMediaLife platform, the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub, and PANDORA – the Viennese circle for digital anthropology.

In her further projects, Dayana Hristova researches embodied communication and creativity in contact improvisation using microexplicative phenomenological methods. In the past, she has also been active in the field of anthropology of the body and has studied the subjective difficulty of dance style acquisition. As a dancer, she has co-created art-based research projects such as re-FLUX at the Barcelona Cognition, Brain & Technology Summer school (BCBT) 2016.