This seminar will explore what it might mean to try bring feminist theory and ideas, in practice, to the design, development and application of robots and human-robot interaction, and why I think this is important if we want to design ethical, effective robots for real world use in high impact contexts like healthcare and education. I will point out how a lot of good, existing social robotics work already embodies key ideas from feminist human computer interaction, but also identify some more explicitly norm-challenging directions that I think represent an exciting opportunity to re-think how we approach the design and use of social robots.

About Katie Winkle:
Katie is an assistant professor at the Department for Information Technology at Uppsala University and is part of the Human Machine Interaction unit at the Division of Vi3, working at the social robotics lab. Before joining Uppsala University, she completed a digital futures postdoctoral research fellowship at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and a PhD in robotics at the Bristol Robotics Lab in the UK. Her work draws from design, computer science, psychology and the social sciences to tackle technical and societal challenges relating to human-machine interaction.