Theoretical approaches draw inspiration from feminist technoscience, critical data studies, decolonial theory, Science & Technology Studies and philosophy, but our work also connects with the field of Human-Robot Interaction, as we collaborate with roboticists around questions of emotion and failure.
The project is a collaboration between social science researchers at Linköping University and robotics researchers at the Social Robotics Lab in Uppsala and in Örebro.
Participants at Gender Studies are Katherine Harrison, Ericka Johnson, Isabel García Velázquez, Maria Arnelid and Dominika Lisy. We are also collaborating with Ginevra Castellano and Katie Winkle (in Uppsala) and Amy Loutfi and Kavyaa Somasundaram (in Örebro).
During the course of the project, we have:
- Conducted fieldwork at robotics labs and ‘in the wild’ in Sweden, France, Germany and Japan.
- Collaborated with roboticists around papers, workshops and projects which engage feminist theory and robotics research, highlights of which include:
- Maria Arnelid and Sofia Thunberg organized a workshop on care robots for older adults at RO-MAN 2022
- Isabel organized a session at the 4S/ESOCITE conference in 2022 called: Caring Futures: Assembling Imaginaries, Embodiments and Practices in Sociotechnical Systems of Care.
- Ericka gave a keynote talk at the HRI 2023 titled “Robotics Research and Teaching with a Feminist Lens”
- Maria, Katherine & Ericka were part of the team of authors behind “Feminist Human-robot interaction: Disentangling Power, Principles and Practice for Better, More Ethical HRI” which won “Best Paper Award” at HRI 2023.
- While at the same meeting Katherine co-organized a workshop called The Imperfectly Relatable Robot: An interdisciplinary workshop on the role of failure in HRI.
- Dominika co-authored an important scoping paper on gendering humanoid robots, together with Giulia Perugia.
- Fostered interdisciplinary conversations around critical robotics, including a critical robotics workshop in Norrköping in 2024 (link to blog here: https://wasp-hs.org/mapping-critical-robotics-an-interdisciplinary-workshop-in-norrkoping/ )
- Integrated our experiences and results into teaching at undergraduate, masters and doctoral level.
Beyond the academy, our outreach includes:
- The pop-up exhibition on social robots that Maria and Dominika curated went live at the Museum of Work, as part of the Digitopia show.
- Working as an expert in the Robotics4EU policy discussions, talks at AI for Girls and East Sweden; Human-Friendly AI at Lund; and FORK (an outreach forum for young people in Linköping)
Our research has been integrated into WASP-HS graduate courses (STS methods for Autonomous Systems & AI and Feminist Technoscience for AI) as well as influenced the undergraduate and MA teaching we do at Linköping University. Some of our teaching has also been on-line: Katherine organized an ACTS/AI4D course on Understanding Responsible AI for students in Africa, which many of us contributed to, on Zoom.
