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

Datum
11. Juni – 13. Juni 2025 

CFP for a pan­el at STS Italia Con­fer­ence, Milan, Italy

CFP for a pan­el on „Car­ing for ‚care’: fem­i­nist STS per­spec­tives on research­ing robots and AI”
10th STS Italia Conference
11 to 13 June
Milan, Italy

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.