Robotics Research and Teaching with a Feminist Lens

Feminism is more than (and often not even) an interest in women's issues. For our robotics research, we use feminist theory as an analytical toolbox, filled with terms and insights to make visible and probe questions of power, representation, and expectations about and between humans and robots in the entangled encounters produced by social robots. Some of these questions are related to gender. Feminist theory gives us a vocabulary to talk about the materiality of robots, but also their positioning in our social encounters, real and imaginary? and how they position us, the users, in those encounters. This keynote will present some of the theoretical insights from feminism and intersectionality that we have found useful & generative; discuss how and where we apply them to our studies of social robots; and reflect on our experiences using these concepts to teach engineering students.

BIO: Ericka Johnson is a professor of gender and society at Linköping University, Sweden, and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. She has an interdisciplinary background in sociology, gender studies, and science & technology studies. Her work explores how technologies of the body refract discourses, articulate silent understandings, highlight cultural values, and make tangible social norms, with a particular interest for technologies of the digital body, from medical simulators to care robots. She is the author of several monographs and anthologies, including: A Cultural Biography of the Prostate (MIT Press 2021) Refracting through Technology (Routledge 2019), and Gendering Drugs: Feminist Studies of Pharmaceuticals (Palgrave 2018). Together with Dr. Katherine Harrison and professor Ginevra Castellano, she is leading an interdisciplinary research project on the ethics and social consequences of AI and caring robots, funded by WASP-HS.