Jennifer Rhee: The Robotic Imaginary, The Human & the Price of Dehumanized Labor
Channel: EMPAC | Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer
Date: 2020-09-15

Taking into account robotics technologies’ increasing presence in our lives, labors, and wars, scholar Jennifer Rhee visited EMPAC to present the following questions: How is the human defined in these robotic visions and technological relations? What are the histories of erasures and exclusions that brought this definition of human into being? Whose lives and labors are excluded from these considerations of the human? This talk draws on Rhee’s book, The Robotic Imaginary: The Human & the Price of Dehumanized Labor (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), which argues that robotic and AI systems reflect historical gendered and racial devaluations around labor.

Jennifer Rhee is associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University.