Caring for ‚care’: feminist STS perspectives on researching robots and AI

Datum
10. Juni – 13. Juni 2025 

Pan­el at STS Italia Conference

CFP for a pan­el on „Car­ing for ‚care’: fem­i­nist STS per­spec­tives on research­ing robots and AI”
Chair: Dr. Ste­vi­en­na de Saille, Lec­tur­er in Sociology
10th STS Italia Con­fer­ence, tak­ing place in Milan
11 to 13 June

Dead­line for abstracts is 3 Feb 2025

You can find more infor­ma­tion here: https://stsitalia.org/conference-2025

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.