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.
--
Dr. Stevienna de Saille, Lecturer in Sociology
Institute for the Study of the Human (iHuman), Department of Sociological
Studies
The University of Sheffield, 2 Whitham Road, Sheffield S10 2AH
PI - Mapping Trustworthy Systems for robots in social care (Map-RAS)
Co-I (Research lead) - Imagining Robotic Care
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