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Race, Gender, and Robotics: Embodying and Designing Difference

Sat, August 19, 12:00 to 1:30pm, Marriott Philadelphia Downtown, Floor: Level 4, Franklin Hall 11

Abstract

‘Robotics has a race problem’ says Sparrow (2019; also Cave and Dihal 2020), as well as a gender problem (Eyssel and Hegel, 2012; Reich-Stiebert and Eyssel, 2017; Jennifer Rhee, 2018). Unlike AI, and to a greater extent than industrial robots, the physical embodiment of social robots matters. Designing for diverse human users is particularly a concern in the subfield of Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR), involving interaction with children, autism spectrum conditions, the elderly, and those with dementia. This paper reports on a series of ethnographic lab visits and robotics groups across the UK and Germany. Lucy Suchman successfully combined the situated empirical observation of interactions with machines with what she calls “an interest in cultural historical continuities and their effects” in Human-Machine Reconfigurations (2007:19), and my project treats these as two related axes:

First, how social robots have coalesced into what Jennifer Rhee (2018) calls historical ‘imaginaries’ of the robot as gendered, raced, and dehumanized labour. Social robots shift the focus from industrial labour to forms of emotional labour which Jennifer Rhee argues “normalizes whiteness” (2018:105) and essentializes gender roles. Black roboticists are pushing back against this (e.g. Ayanna Howard at Georgia Tech and her ‘Black in Robotics’ organization; Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, a member of ‘Black in Computing’). How robots ‘became’ white (and, mostly, female) therefore remains one of the most significant cultural-historical questions.

Second, what social science methods can contribute to future design and interaction protocols. How can nonverbal communication (NVC) enhance the approachability of robots to diverse human users? Using case studies including Block and Kuchenbecker’s HuggieBot 2.0 at Max Planck, I consider what tools do we have for observing and notating such haptic and proxemic interactions, and how can this feed back into the design process to enhance approachability?

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