Dominika Lisy

My PhD project is on empathy and social robots from a feminist philosophy perspective. I draw from new materialist and posthuman feminist theory to understand the boundaries of binaries such as human/non-human, self/other, and reason/emotion. I want to contribute with this work to ethical implementations of empathy in robots. In particular, I am arguing for understanding empathy differently than within a human body. Empathy to me is a process of crossing boundaries and in order to think about this concept I explore the skin as a boundary of the self to understand the sturdiness or flexibility of boundaries of the self or being human. The first part of my project will be a philosophical engagement on the reconfiguration of empathic interaction and my personal research process as a way to unlearn dominant forms of knowing in academic and disciplinary structures. Building on that, in the second part I plan to be more involved with practical aspects of creating affective interaction with robots in order to implement and experiment with my theoretical ideas on empathy.