Robots for Care: Exploring Downstream Socio-Ethical Effects & Upstream Interventions
Workshop
Hybrid and interactive workshop
Call for papers: Robots for Care: Exploring Downstream Socio-Ethical Effects & Upstream Interventions, Workshop @ HRI 2026
🗓️ Submission deadline: February 9, 2026 (AoE)
🗓️ Workshop date: March 16, 2026, Morning GMT
🙌 Workshop format: Hybrid and interactive
🔗 Workshop website: https://healthrobotsworkshop.github.io
This is an invitation for contributions to the workshop „Robots for Care: Exploring Downstream Socio-Ethical Effects and Upstream Interventions” held in conjunction with the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human–Robot Interaction (HRI 2026).
The context: Robots hold potential to expand accessibility to disabled communities, such as by providing physical or cognitive assistance, and enabling new ways of participating in social activities. They also can support healthcare workers with ancillary tasks and care delivery, to support them working at the top of their license. However, the real-world deployment of robots across these contexts can create social, ethical, and organizational challenges (e.g., downstream effects). They may undermine the agency of disabled people, disrupt care delivery, shift roles, and displace labor.
Our aim: Bring together multidisciplinary stakeholders to examine these downstream effects and explore how they might be mitigated through upstream interventions of design, research, and policy.
How to contribute: We welcome short contributions discussing topics relevant to the workshop. Topics include, but are not limited to:
Ethical, legal, and social implications of robots in clinical or assistive contexts
Critical reflections on mis/alignments between design goals and impacts of robots on disabled communities
Upstream interventions at the meso or macro level (e.g., community programs, participatory research, policies)
Community-based research practices
Experience reports or deployment insights from contexts including:
Socially assistive robots
Cognitively assistive robots
Physically assistive robots
Hospital deployed robots (e.g., delivery, sanitation, surgery)
Rehabilitation robotics
We particularly encourage submissions that surface lived experiences, or cross-disciplinary insights that may be underrepresented in traditional academic venues.
Written submissions will be posted on our website, and presented interactively during a poster session. There will also be opportunities to contribute to a follow-up journal special issue.
Potential Attendees: We encourage academics, non-academics, and people with/without affiliations to participate in the workshop. Submitting a paper is not mandatory to attend. The workshop is designed to be interactive and participatory, and we are interested in welcoming people from many backgrounds. The workshop will be hybrid to support accessibility.
We appreciate your help in sharing this workshop with relevant parties.
✉️ Contact: healthrobotsworkshop@gmail.com
Living with Inflammation: Inquiry into the Ontology and Politics of Flammability
Workshop
Workshop in Prague, Czech Republic
CfP: „Living with Inflammation: Inquiry into the Ontology and Politics of Flammability”
Event Date: 9. 4. 2026 – 10. 4. 2026
Time and Place of Event: Academic Conference Center, Prague, Czech Republic
Organizers: Tereza Stöckelová and Hana Porkertová (Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences) and Léa Perraudin (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Keynotes: Harris Solomon (Duke University) and Andrea Ford (University of Edinburgh)
In contemporary biomedicine, inflammation has emerged as a central concept in understanding health and disease. It is increasingly studied as a physiological process underlying a wide array of conditions—from obesity and cardiovascular disease to neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer’s, as well as depression and cancer (Furman et al., 2019; Medzhitov, 2008). While acute inflammation—a targeted response to specific stressors or injury—is a vital and protective function of the immune system, chronic low-grade inflammation is now recognized as a source of long-term harm.
Considering these developments, Hannah Landecker (2024) argues that inflammation research has profound implications for understanding how society “gets under the skin.” She observes that “the inflammatory body emerging from the studies of adiposity and diabetes is produced by metabolizing material and psychosocial conditions.” In this way, social inequalities manifest as inflammatory states—not as downstream consequences but as upstream conditions of health disparities.
Attention to inflammation may, in turn, illuminate the intricate entanglements of bodies, ecologies, and material infrastructures, drawing critical attention to the creeping conditions of exposure, contamination, and toxicity associated with anthropogenic interference (Alaimo, 2016; Chen, 2012; Liboiron, 2021; Murphy, 2017; Naddaf, 2025; Shotwell, 2016). Inflammability may also serve as a productive lens for analysing the reactive (mal)functions of material objects within technological systems—whether solar batteries, urban infrastructures, or post-industrial landscapes. While flaming combustion is a high-temperature chemical reaction prone to escalating momentum, the colder burn and slow spread of latent, smouldering processes invite reflection on their temporal and material thresholds (Perraudin 2025).
Drawing on STS studies of social topology (de Laet & Mol, 2000; Mol & Law, 1994; Law & Singleton, 2005), Porkertová and Stöckelová (2025) recently introduced the notion of the inflammable object to describe a specific capacity to “catch fire”: such objects embody both the potential to erupt and the possibility of fragile control that prevents irreversible damage. Inflammability is thus neither fully eliminable; rather, it may serve as a harbinger of systemic disturbance and complexity. The issue, then, is not one of eradication but, to paraphrase Haraway (2016), of finding ways to live with the smouldering trouble.
We invite papers that examine inflammatory or inflammable objects across diverse settings, to explore the analytical productivity of inflammation (as a condition), flammability (as a quality), and smouldering (as a process). How do these concepts relate, overlap, or intra-sect within bodies, materials, and ecosystems? Our aim is to ignite—and keep smouldering—a sustained conversation that will culminate in a special journal issue.
Deadline for abstracts (max. 300 words): 23 January 2026
Submit proposals to: hana.porkertova@soc.cas.cz
Selected participants will be expected to submit a 3,000-word draft paper by 31 March 2026.
Papers will be shared with all participants prior to the workshop, and each paper will be assigned a discussant.
https://www.soc.cas.cz/en/events/conferences/living-with-inflammation-inquiry-into-the-ontology-and-politics-of-flammability
Assisted Reproductive Technology and Social Sciences: Thinking about what’s missing. Inventing possibilities
Workshop
CfP for Symposium in Aubervilliers, France
Symposium “Assisted Reproductive Technology and Social Sciences: Thinking about what’s missing. Inventing possibilities”
May 29, 2026
Campus Condorcet (Aubervilliers, France)
We welcome contributions from all fields of the social sciences addressing the gaps, limits, and unmet needs in ART, as well as methodological and interdisciplinary approaches to explore them.
Please note that presentations will take place on-site only.
Deadline for proposals: December 1, 2025
Email: parcours2026@gmail.com
Abstract length: approx. 300 words (notification by end of December)
The full call for papers can be found below
Open Call for Abstracts: Symposium „Reproductive Health in Fragile Democracies”
Workshop
Symposium in Riga, Latvia
International symposium Reproductive Health in Fragile Democracies: Bodies, Technologies and Futures
June 8–9, 2026
Pauls Stradiņš Medicine History Museum in Riga, Latvia
The symposium brings together scholars and practitioners from the social sciences, humanities, and healthcare fields to explore reproduction as a key site for thinking about democracy, inequality, and the politics of care, particularly in contexts of fragile or shifting democratic institutions.
Submission deadline: March 1, 2026 (11:55 PM CET)
Submission link: https://forms.gle/3KGXDLuTnSmXDfnT8
Format: title, affiliation, and 200-word abstract
Participation: free of charge
Keynote speakers include Agnieszka Kościańska (University of Warsaw) and Anika König (Freie Universität Berlin).
CfP: Democracy as Health
Workshop
CfP for Workshop and Edited Volume
CfP: Democracy as Health; Workshop and Edited Volume; June 29–30, 2026, Geneva
Call for papers for a workshop taking place next summer, which intends to lead to an edited volume, titled ‘Democracy as Health.’ This event will take place in Geneva on June 29–30, 2026, organized by myself and Professor Aditya Bharadwaj from the Geneva Graduate Institute. We have the honor to be joined by keynote speakers including Professors Jessica Mulligan, Sandra Bärnreuther, Janina Kehr, and Ruth Prince.
The full call for papers is available at the link below, and attached. We encourage ethnographically grounded perspectives across all contexts. Abstract submissions of up to 500 words should be sent to Robert.Smith@graduateinstitute.ch no later than January 5th, 2026. The workshop is in person. Partial funding stipends are available for participants on a need-based basis. Participants should indicate their interest in financial support at the time of their application. Should you have any questions, please also feel free to reach out to me directly.
CfP:
Globally, publicly funded healthcare has become increasingly politicized within democratic processes over the past decades. Ranging from the politicization of the United States’ Affordable Care Act dubbed ‘ObamaCare,’ the resistance to the increasing privatization of the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, populist political brandings of healthcare infrastructures in South Asia, or citizen activism across contexts, health has increasingly entered democratic agendas. Contrasting from 20th century political movements around healthcare that garnered momentum through specific disease categories, such as HIV-AIDS (Biehl 2004) or affliction of specifically marginalized populations (Petryna 2013), contemporary politicizations are increasingly mobilizing broad visions of ‘health’ for electoral gains (Kehr, Muinde, and Prince 2023; Cooper, 2019). In many settings, such politicizations take the form of one-off schemes that are typically politically temporary and partial in nature, relying on decades of state neglect in healthcare to be perceived as successful by the electorate. Paradoxically, this rising electoral-politicization of health services and programs also takes place within contexts of rising health austerity.
Therefore, in this workshop, we seek to use this emergence of health as an explicit object of electoral-political agendas to think through the contemporary relationship between democracy and health, and more broadly the politics of bio-politics. The concept of ‘politics,’ most broadly, has been a longstanding concern for medical anthropologists’ engagement with patients’ experiences, and understandings of power. Seminally, Foucault’s notion of ‘biopolitics’ has provided a conceptual foundation for medical anthropologists to make sense of how processes of subjectivization take place within health’s domains, and the governmental apparatuses that animate those processes. Notably, biopolitically inspired frameworks of politics have shaped how anthropologists engage with how patients mobilize pathological-biological identities to place citizenship claims upon the state (Rose and Novas 2005; Biehl 2004; Petryna 2013; Ticktin 2011 Nguyen 2010), how biomedical knowledge can be used to claim authority in state spaces (Adams 1998), or how medicine is mobilized as a symbol of national modernity (Brotherton 2012; Al-Dewachi 2017). Yet, neighboring disciplines have pointed out that the use of politics in this literature may risk confining itself to the realm of the biological, and can “undermine the political” as an analytical category by discounting how other forms of politics intersect with biologized politics of health (Bird and Lynch 2019). Overall, the concept of ‘politics,’ often quickly glossed through the ‘politics of health,’ maintains a degree of ambivalence in the cannon of medical anthropology.
In response, this workshop seeks to bring together leading scholars to ethnographically think through this in a way that is generative of novel conceptual formulations to understand the contemporary relationship between democracy and health. Democracy, in this sense, while grounded in processes of electoral-politics, is not empirically confined to the practice of voting nor the ritual of elections, but seeks to account for the different realms of the political that work alongside, within, and through, and are also constructed by, the politics of health. In approaching these questions, we aim to more explicitly bring together literature in medical and political anthropology. Doing so particularly takes stalk of how concepts of political, affective feelings of political existence, and the material-spectral realities of the state inform subjectivities towards health and care (Aretxaga 2003; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Candea 2011; Postero and Elinoff 2019; Steet 2012; Vollebergh, Koning, and Marchesi, 2021). This intersection presents opportunities to engage with different readings of biopolitics. Specifically, early Foucauldian ideas of locatable, tangible ‘veins of power’ — as possible to see within biomedical clinics — as well as later Foucauldian ideas that power is everywhere — as possible to see within political affects — which need alignment in order to understand contemporary formations of democracy as health.
This edited volume revolves around the idea that, amidst rising fascist, authoritarian tendencies that rely upon health as an electoral-political tool, it is increasingly urgent to reimagine the relationship between democracy and health. This volume will seek to revolve around the following central questions:
· How does democracy reimagine the idea of health as an optic, a good, a right, a service, and more, in relation to the state and the private sector?
· What do democratic processes do to the figure of the clinic and how does it modulate its gaze?
· What does the relationship between democracy and health do to imaginations and relationalities between states and subjects?
· How does health’s electoral-political uptake transmit into the realm of patient experience, subjectivity and embodiment?
Full CfP as PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1x2s1TAuj-E5nbcM9c9GBcbhC3xF0kMWp/view?usp=drive_link
CfP: De-/valuations in paid care work
Workshop
Workshop at University of Lucerne, Switzerland
Call for Papers
Workshop: De-/valuations in paid care work
University of Lucerne, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
July 2–3, 2026
Organized by Madhurilata Basu, Jürg Bühler, Sandra Bärnreuther
Research on care work has often paid attention to questions of value and valuation: be it the
description of care work as a labor of love, empathy, and concern (Rose 1983), as a source of
surplus value (Federici 2012), as a commodity embedded in the global economy (Hochschild
2000, Parreñas 2000), or as a foundation for developing alternative ethical and political theories
(Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984; Held 2006, Tronto 1993). While some studies examine
different understandings and practices of good care alongside the tensions and contradictions
they produce (Kleinman 2009, Smith-Morris 2018, Stevenson 2014), much of the research on
paid care work emphasizes issues of deskilling, devaluation, and the extraction of value (e.g.,
John and Wichterich 2023). The gendering of care work as female, and its links to domestic
and bodily labor, are shown to be crucial in understanding the exploitation and marginalization
of care workers, although there are notable differences across various groups (Cohen and
Wolkowitz 2018, Ray 2019).
The valuation and devaluation of care occur through complex processes, including ongoing
negotiations with larger economic and societal structures. Given the highly ambiguous nature
of these valuations, it is easy to overlook that care workers themselves assign meaning, moral
significance, and value to their work, often in ways that may differ from popular and scholarly
descriptions and assessments. Understanding these self-perceptions is essential, even though
care workers’ voices often remain unheard. Tracing intricate processes of valuation and
devaluation by care workers and other actors involved in paid care work is therefore crucial for
understanding how care work is experienced and shaped over time.
This workshop aims to examine valuation practices related to paid care work, emphasizing the
perspectives of various actors, including caregivers, members of care institutions (such as
management, educators, and doctors), and care recipients. We follow Dussauge et al. (2015) in
viewing value(s) not as “prefixed entit[ies] which explain […] action” but treat “the genesis,
articulation, dispute, and settling of what comes to count as values as matters for empirical
investigation and explanation” (ibid., 6). Through an in-depth analysis of the making of values
in care practice, we seek to understand processes of de-/valuation of care work, skills, degrees,
health, and workers themselves. Importantly, power is not absent in this approach; to the
contrary: “By studying the making of values traditionally seen as belonging to different
domains we can see power struggles over which values are to be dominant, the making of
boundaries between values (that may become made as separate), and when different values are
made commensurable” (ibid.). The workshop highlights the conflicting concerns and stakes
involved in providing care, as well as how valuations are actively produced, transformed, and
maintained.
We invite ethnographically oriented scholars studying paid care work across various fields and
regions to join this workshop. Possible topics for papers might include: discourses of de-
/valuation in educational institutions and workplaces; rationalizations of different labor
regimes; relationships among different groups of care workers and other professional groups;
changes in workforce composition; labor struggles and unionization efforts; the introduction
of new technologies; or care work and the platform economy.
Please send your abstract (up to 500 words) and author biography (up to 100 words) by
January 16, 2026, to madhurilata.basu@unilu.ch. We may have limited funds to support travel
and accommodation costs for a few participants. Please indicate in your application if you
require financial assistance.
De-/valuations in paid care work
Workshop
Workshop at the University of Lucerne, Switzerland
Call for Papers
Workshop: De-/valuations in paid care work
University of Lucerne, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology
July 2–3, 2026
Organized by Madhurilata Basu, Jürg Bühler, Sandra Bärnreuther
Research on care work has often paid attention to questions of value and valuation: be it the description of care work as a labor of love, empathy, and concern (Rose 1983), as a source of surplus value (Federici 2012), as a commodity embedded in the global economy (Hochschild 2000, Parreñas 2000), or as a foundation for developing alternative ethical and political theories (Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984; Held 2006, Tronto 1993). While some studies examine different understandings and practices of good care alongside the tensions and contradictions they produce (Kleinman 2009, Smith-Morris 2018, Stevenson 2014), much of the research on paid care work emphasizes issues of deskilling, devaluation, and the extraction of value (e.g., John and Wichterich 2023). The gendering of care work as female, and its links to domestic and bodily labor, are shown to be crucial in understanding the exploitation and marginalization of care workers, although there are notable differences across various groups (Cohen and Wolkowitz 2018, Ray 2019).
The valuation and devaluation of care occur through complex processes, including ongoing negotiations with larger economic and societal structures. Given the highly ambiguous nature of these valuations, it is easy to overlook that care workers themselves assign meaning, moral significance, and value to their work, often in ways that may differ from popular and scholarly descriptions and assessments. Understanding these self-perceptions is essential, even though care workers’ voices often remain unheard. Tracing intricate processes of valuation and devaluation by care workers and other actors involved in paid care work is therefore crucial for understanding how care work is experienced and shaped over time.
This workshop aims to examine valuation practices related to paid care work, emphasizing the perspectives of various actors, including caregivers, members of care institutions (such as management, educators, and doctors), and care recipients. We follow Dussauge et al. (2015) in viewing value(s) not as “prefixed entit[ies] which explain […] action” but treat “the genesis, articulation, dispute, and settling of what comes to count as values as matters for empirical investigation and explanation” (ibid., 6). Through an in-depth analysis of the making of values in care practice, we seek to understand processes of de-/valuation of care work, skills, degrees, health, and workers themselves. Importantly, power is not absent in this approach; to the contrary: “By studying the making of values traditionally seen as belonging to different domains we can see power struggles over which values are to be dominant, the making of boundaries between values (that may become made as separate), and when different values are made commensurable” (ibid.). The workshop highlights the conflicting concerns and stakes involved in providing care, as well as how valuations are actively produced, transformed, and maintained.
We invite ethnographically oriented scholars studying paid care work across various fields and regions to join this workshop. Possible topics for papers might include: discourses of de-/valuation in educational institutions and workplaces; rationalizations of different labor regimes; relationships among different groups of care workers and other professional groups; changes in workforce composition; labor struggles and unionization efforts; the introduction of new technologies; or care work and the platform economy.
Please send your abstract (up to 500 words) and author biography (up to 100 words) by January 16, 2026, to madhurilata.basu@unilu.ch. We may have limited funds to support travel and accommodation costs for a few participants. Please indicate in your application if you require financial assistance.
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