Join us for the New Faculty Seminar Series where we will feature the work of new colleagues in the Humanities at UB. By bringing together scholars from a variety of fields, we hope that these seminars will initiate and encourage the development of interdisciplinary conversations.

This seminar series is free and open to the public; coffee and cookies will be served.

Margaret Rhee is Assistant Professor of Media Study.

Robots, like any technology, are not “objective” or “universal”; Instead, machines reveal the process of social formation. This talk demonstrates how difference–such as race, gender, and sexuality–are shaped by and co-constitutive with technological developments. Specifically, this talk illustrates how the robot is a primary locus of racialization for Asian Americans within modernity’s distinction between humans and machines. Through historical editorial cartoons
of Chinese automatons, 1960s robotic art, science fiction poetry, and contemporary developments of artificial intelligence, this lecture demonstrates while race been shaped by technology, technology has always been imbued with the politics of difference.