WEEK 18 / SEMINAR WITH NEDA ATANASOSKI & KALINDI VORA

Surrogate Humanity

SEMINAR LEADERS

Photograph by Francesca Romeo

[ IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A portrait of Neda Atanasoski. Neda has black hair and brown eyes. She has bangs and a red streak in her hair that frames the left side of her face. She is wearing red lipstick, earrings, and a black sleeveless shirt. Looking directly into the camera, she is smiling slightly with her mouth closed. The photo captures her upper torso and head, and she is centered in the image. Behind her is a dark green wall of plants, which span the entire background of the photograph. ︎︎ heart symbol ]

Neda Atanasoski is Visiting Professor and Chair of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She is the author of Humanitarian Violence: The U.S. Deployment of Diversity (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) and Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (co-authored with Kalindi Vora, Duke University Press, 2019). She is also the co-editor of a 2017 special issue of the journal Social Identities, titled “Postsocialist Politics and the Ends of Revolution.” Atanasoski has published articles on gender and religion, nationalism and war, human rights and humanitarianism, and race and technology. Atanasoski serves as the co-editor of the journal Critical Ethnic Studies. Prior to UMD, she was Professor of Feminsit Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz, where she was also the founding co-director of the Center for Racial Justice.

Photograph by University of California, Davis

[ IMAGE DESCRIPTION: A square portrait of Kalindi Vora. Kalindi wears her dark brown hair pinned back with her bangs swept to the side. She has a slight smile and is looking directly into the camera. The top of her head is slightly out of frame, and the neckline of her black blazer and red shirt is just within frame. Behind her, and out of focus, are the leaves of a plant. ︎︎ heart symbol ]

Kalindi Vora is Visiting Professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration, and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her first book, Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (Rachel Carson Book Prize 2018), takes up questions of technology, colonialism and raced and gendered labor under globalization. Her second book is Surrogate Humanity: Race Robotics and the Politics of Technological Futures (Duke 2019), co-authored with Neda Atanasoski, a project on the racial and gendered politics of robotics and artificial intelligence. With the Precarity Lab, she is co-author of Technoprecarious (2020). Her past research has included ethnographic study of IT professionals and gestational surrogates in India, about which she has edited special issues and published in journals such as: Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Social Identities, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Postmodern Culture, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience. Prior to Yale, she was the Director of the Feminist Research Institute and Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at The University of California Davis and Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego.

ASSIGNMENT

Readings

Atanasoski, Neda, and Kalindi Vora. “The Surrogate Human Affect: The Racial Programming of Robot Emotion.” Surrogate Humanity Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, 108-133. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
Please read pages 108-133.
Atanasoski, Neda, and Kalindi Vora. “Epilogue: On Technoliberal Desire, Or Why There Is No Such Thing as a Feminist AI.” Surrogate Humanity Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures, 188-196. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.
Please read pages 188-196.

SHOW NOTES

Excerpts from Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures (mentioned by Kalindi around 2:45) can be found above and here for Chapter Four and here for the Epilogue.
The cover art for Surrogate Humanity is Vicious Circle by Peter William Holden (mentioned by Kalindi around 2:59). Documentation of the kinetic sculpture can be found here (still) and here (video). The images and videos at these links are not described, however, an image description of Vicious Circle can be found above.
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture) by Saidiya Hartman (mentioned by Kalindi around 4:48) can be found here.
Saidiya Hartman’s reference to Toni Morrison’s formulation of enslaved people as "surrogate selves for the meditation on the problems of human freedom" (quoted by Kalindi around 5:13) is from Morrison’s book Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, found here.
Video documentation of Simone Brown’s lecture, Thinking A.I. through Rastus Robot, the Westinghouse Mechanical Slave here may provide further context for Neda’s mention of the robot (around 8:08).
The archive website of Cynthia Breazeal’s Kismet project (mentioned by Neda around 8:56) can be found here.
Charles Darwin's 1872 writing on emotion, in which he makes the case that “non-European races display base emotions transparently” (as described by Neda around 10:08) is from The expression of the emotions in man and animals and can be found here and here (screen reader accessible).
The website of Furby (mentioned by Davecat around 12:45) can be found here.
The Wikipedia entry describing Westinghouse surface-to-air missile weapons (mentioned by Davecat around 13:43) can be found here.
Kismet was discussed during Week Five with seminar leader Son Kit (mentioned by Amber around 14:35).
A list of selected publications by scholar Nick Mitchell (mentioned by Neda around 18:20) can be found here.
The website for Mine Kafon (mentioned by Kalindi around 20:45) can be found here.
The page dedicated to Atlas on the Boston Dynamics website (mentioned by Kalindi around 21:54) can be found here.
The website of Campaign Against Sex Robots (mentioned by Neda around 23:32) can be found here.
A list of selected publications by scholar Kathleen Richardson (mentioned by Neda around 31:26) can be found here.
The Wikipedia entry for the film Witchfinder General (mentioned by Davecat around 33:29) can be found here.
The Wikipedia entry for Cherry 2000 (mentioned by Davecat around 34:00) can be found here.
Week Fourteen with Kyla Schuller (mentioned by Amber around 36:01) can be found here.
A list of representative publications by Hortense Spillers (mentioned by Kalindi around 40:37) can be found here.
Context for Unicole Unicron and UNICULT’s proposed robot brothel (mentioned by Davecat around 46:43) may be found in Can Sex Robots Give Consent? here.
Context for Neda’s mention of Atlas turning on the Boston Dynamics creators (around 55:00) may be found here.
The Wikipedia entry for Martine Rothblatt (mentioned by Neda around 58:46) can be found here.
Stephanie Dinkins’ video Bina48 on Racism (mentioned by Neda around 1:00:00) can be found here.
A profile of Pearl the Nursebot (mentioned by Kalindi around 1:02:16) can be found here.
The MIT website of Kelly Dobson (mentioned by Kalindi around 1:03:00) can be found here. And the project overview for Omo (mentioned by Kalindi around 1:03:05) can be found here.
PARO the robot seal (mentioned by Davecat) around 1:07:52 can be found here.
The website of The North American International Auto Show (mentioned by Davecat around 1:09:01) can be found here.
Stephanie Dinkins’ AI.ASSEMBLY (mentioned by Amber around 1:12:13) can be found here.
Kino Coursey (mentioned by Amber around 1:12:40) can be found here.
More information on Andyroid (mentioned by Davecat around 1:18:29) can be found here.
Matt McMullen (mentioned by Davecat around 1:21:17) can be found here.
The Wikipedia entry for the Mechanical Turk (mentioned by Davecat around 1:22:00) can be found here.
The Mechanical Turk is also discussed during Week Five with seminar leader Son Kit.
The Wikipedia entry for Pierre Jaquet-Droz and his automata (mentioned by Davecat around 1:23:00) can be found here.
The Wikipedia entry for The Digesting Duck (mentioned by Davecat around 1:24:23 as the Mechanical Duck) can be found here.

Surrogate Humanity was recorded on May 22, 2021.

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Surrogate Humanity