12:30-12:40:
Cathrine Hasse, Professor in Anthropology at Aarhus University: Welcome and introduction
12:40-13:20:
Morana Alac, Associate Professor at UC San Diego: “On everyday encounters with an educational robot and the quest for individualized instruction”
This talk will focus on a preschool’s indigenous methods employed in engaging a robot. I will pay attention to touch, spatial organizations and how communicative modes feature in encounters between preschool habitants, researchers and their robot. I will relate this to examples from US mass media outlets articulated to tame anxieties that educational robots provoke. I will show how these ideologies, inscribed in the technology, are acted and contested at the preschool.
13:20-14:00:
Jennifer Robertson, Professor in Anthropology at University of Michigan: “Cyborg Able-ism”
This presentation explores and interrogates the development and application of robotic prosthetic devices that effectively transform senior and disabled persons into human machine hybrids.
14:00-14:30:
Questions and plenary discussion
Discussants: Associate Professor Jamie Wallace, Aarhus University & Associate Professor Gunhild Borggreen, University of Copenhagen
14:30-14:50: Coffee break
14:50-16:10:
Lucy Suchman, Professor at Lancaster University & Claudia Castaneda, Senior Scholar-in-Residence at Emerson College: “Robot Biographies”
This joint presentation turns the sensibilities of object biography onto a class of objects for which the term ‘biography’ takes on a sense more closely aligned with the biological beings from which the word is derived. These are humanlike machines and, more specifically, robots.
16:10-16:40:
Questions and plenary discussion
Discussants: Professor Estrid Sørensen, Ruhr-Universität Bochum & Professor Dorte Marie Søndergaard, Aarhus University
16.40.17.00:
Cathrine Hasse, Professor in Anthropology at Aarhus University: Summing up the day
