Anna Guevarra is Associate Professor and Director of the Global Asian Studies Program as well as Co-PI of the UIC AANAPISI Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her interdisciplinary scholarly, creative, and teaching interests focus on immigrant and transnational labor, the geopolitics of carework, critical diaspora studies, and community engagement as they relate to dynamics of race, gender, and empire. She is the author of,Marketing Dreams and Manufacturing Heroes: The Transnational Labor Brokering of Filipino Workers (2010), and co-editor of Immigrant Women Workers in the Neoliberal Age (2013). Her work has also appeared in Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Social Identities, the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography, and numerous edited anthologies. Her two current projects explore the simulation of carework through robotic technology and (with Gayatri Reddy) the history of the descendants of Indian Sepoys who settled in the Philippines after the 18th century British occupation.
Abstract:
From Supermaids to Cybraceras: Revisiting ‘Care Chains’ in the Age of Robotic Technology
For decades, science and the public have been fascinated by the immense promise (and danger) of artificial intelligence. Globally, media headlines have loudly proclaimed the death of humanity with the ‘rise of the robots.’ While reports of such death may be greatly exaggerated, developments in the field of situated robotics have increasingly played with the boundaries between human and machine, intervening in the labor of care work. Such work has focused on the role of automation in revolutionizing arenas of everyday life, expressly using mimicry and simulation of human behaviors to achieve these ends. Of particular concern to this paper is the roboticization of care labor in education, health care, and domestic arenas, what I am referring to as the production of “simulations of care,” that are creating new forms of intimacy while blurring the boundaries between human and machine. These simulations now mediate, broker, and diversify new forms of labor by the introduction of non-human actors and in so doing, are creating new forms of sociality. Thus, in this context, the paper will also revisit the notion of ‘global care chains,’ exploring whether it can fully account for the complexities of such contemporary forms of labor migration, articulations of gendered and racialized ‘skill,’ and changing relationships between human and non-human. In a technological era where automation, simulation, and mimicry are the new vocabularies of innovation and exploitation and potentially diversity, this paper asks: what are new hierarchies, idioms of power, and theoretical frames to explore this altered landscape? What are the implications of incorporating non-human actors into our social, economic, and political landscape, and how does this impact questions of labor, migration, and our very understandings of diversity?