CFP STS Italia: Caring for 'care': feminist STS perspectives on researching robots and AI
Dear colleagues,
I'm pleased to share the CFP for a panel on "Caring for 'care': feminist STS perspectives on researching robots and AI" which I will be chairing at the 10th STS Italia Conference, taking place in Milan from 11 to 13 June. Deadline for abstracts is 3 Feb 2025. You can find more information here: https://stsitalia.org/conference-2025/
I look forward to your contributions.
Best regards, Stevienna
Caring for “care”: feminist STS perspectives on researching robots and AI
In some languages, such as Italian, there is a distinction between caring for/caring about (cura) and providing health or social care (assistenza). In other languages, particularly English, “care” can become a catch-all encompasing the emotive, the transactional and the systemic. This semiotic slippage, particularly in discussions about emerging technologies such as robots and AI, means that things which cannot actually care are increasingly touted as the solution for “the crisis of care” for disabled and older people, ie. those who advanced capitalist societies tend to care the least about.
Beginning with the work of Tronto and Bellacasa, this traditional open panel asks how “care” becomes constructed, deconstructed, entangled, detangled, implicated and alienated in these discussions in different languages and different cultural contexts. It asks how those of us doing empirical research on the use of robots and AI in care can develop scholarship that uses feminist STS sensibilities, paradigms and practices to inform our participation. How can the confluence of the robotic, the human and the social be studied with care, when neither the problems, context, purpose nor users are well defined and the language of “care” is not universal? What other forms of knowledge production could we utilize as an antidote to instrumental engineering imaginaries, particularly where these claim to be solving the “problem” of caring for societally vulnerable groups? How do we as STS scholars work against technosolutionism, and avoid being co-opted into instrumental imaginaries when working on interdisciplinary projects? In other words, how do we care for “care”?
This panel invites papers which discuss these and similar questions about mobilizing STS sensibilities to help transform and make visible the care in care robotics, in ways which can shape and influence the trajectory of engineering projects. We are especially interested in qualitative empirical research that examines the positionality and reflexivity of STS scholars with regard to the study of “robots/AI for care”, as well as those examining the new and experimental forms of normativity and relationality which are beginning to arise around robots, AI and human engagement in this field. Contributions may include (but are not limited to) those which discuss “care” as:
· an ontological object, an ontology, an object conflict;
· an epistomology;
· a verb, an action;
· an ethics, a politics, a moral imperative, a normative orientation;
· a set of relations, a system;
· a metaphor;
· a synonym for maintenance, responsibility, nurturance…
· or any other way of approaching robots and AI in care as a topic for (feminist) STS. EASST's Eurograd mailing list -- eurograd-easst.net@lists.easst.net Archive: https://lists.easst.net/hyperkitty/list/eurograd-easst.net@lists.easst.net/ Edit your delivery settings there using Account dropdown, Mailman settings. Website: https://easst.net/easst_eurograd/ Meet us on Mastodon: https://assemblag.es/@easst Or X: https://twitter.com/STSeasst
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