Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Gender as a Category of Knowledge

Patricia Treusch

PhD Project:

A Travelogue through the Field of Companion Robots & Co

Treusch
 

Description of the Project

 

This project focuses on innovation and reasearch practices within contemporary robotics, envisioning, designing, and building the humanoid robot. Through these, the humanoid is becoming »our« companion and co-worker, not only in factories, but also at home. Drawing on a socio-ethnograpic framework, I map the figure of the humanoid service and care robot through Haraway’s epistemological and ontological analytical tool of the »travelogue« (Haraway 1992). The travelogue implies a research in dialogue between the fields of humanoid robotics and queer-feminist epistemology, body, and materiality theories. It is based on several research stays at a German humanoid robotics laboratory, as well as my readings in queer-feminist cultural studies of technoscience. Central to this dialogical mapping is the question of how to relate to the »humanoid other,« and how to connect differently, following the desire for playful – but responsible – linkages between human and humanoid.

                                              
Particulars

Studied Sociology at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main. Since 2009 PhD candidate at Zentrum für Interdisziplinäre Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung of Technischen Universität Berlin and 2010 – 2013 fellow at the research training group »Gender as a Category of Knowledge«.

   
Selected Publications

zus. m. Eva Sänger, Annalena Dörr u. Judith Scheunemann: Embodying Schwangerschaft: pränatales Eltern-Werden im Kontext medizinischer Risikodiskurse und Geschlechternormen. In: GENDER 5/1 (2013). S. 56 – 71.

   

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