Revolutions: Material Forms, Mobile Futures
Monday Night Lecture Series | Spring 2020

Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots and the Politics of Technological Futures

Kalindi Vora • University of California, Davis

Neda Atanasoski • University of California, Santa Cruz

April 6 @ 6 P.M.
Zoom Conference: https://wesleyan.zoom.us/j/2771376308

Based on Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora's co-authored book, “Surrogate Humanity,” this talk elaborates what we call the surrogate human effect in the engineering, political, and cultural imaginaries behind recent developments in social, industrial, and military robotics. We extend a critical ethnic studies analytic to include the raced and gendered social relations between bodies, both machine and human, that are not recognizably racialized. We argue that these relations, too, are part of the fabric of racial liberalism in which practices of reducing the humanity of (racialized) others functions to prop up our recognition of what counts as human, and what makes us feel human. Tracking the surrogate human effect allows us to expose how a seemingly neutral technological modernity is in fact infused with the racial, gender, and sexual politics of political modernity, based as they are in racial slavery, colonial conquest and genocide.

Revolutions: Material Forms, Mobile Futures
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