Medical Humanities

Academic Contact: Amelia DeFalco
Academic Staff: Professor Stuart Murray, Dr Ali Alazmani, Dr Amelia DeFalco, Professor Shane Xie

This work explores the shifting meanings of the “subject,” human or otherwise, in the posthuman world. The “posthuman” is shorthand for an expanded, even exploded vision of the human in the late twentieth and twenty-first century, when the forms and opportunities for bodily augmentation, digital connectivity, cybernetic hybridity, and biotechnological interventions have become ubiquitous in many parts of the world. This research considers how robotics is transforming conceptions of the human and what it means to be a subject, that is, a sensing, feeling, knowing being inhabiting a world of other (posthuman) subjects.

There are two medical humanities research projects at Leeds involving robotics -

Posthuman Care

This project reconsiders the concept, philosophy, and practice of care following contemporary critical reorientations toward materiality, vulnerability and the posthuman. Drawing on recent critical ‘turns’ toward animality, vulnerability, materiality and the posthuman, this project asks: how might the philosophy of care be reimagined in dialogue with posthumanism? How can the shared attention to embodiment, contingency and interdependence in posthumanism, new materialism, and philosophy of care be cultivated in ways that expand and enrich both perspectives? Through research and public engagement activities, IPC explored contemporary literary and cinematic representations of nonhuman companionship and assistance. In particular, it analysed care robots, both real and imagined, as test cases for imagining the possibility of a posthuman ethics of care.

The work undertaken for IPC is currently being developed into a new project on the entanglement of cultural and engineering robot imaginaries.

Publications:

Amelia DeFalco, Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care, Oxford University Press (2023).

Amelia DeFalco, “What Do Sex Robots Want? Representation, Materiality and Queer Use.” Configurations 31.3 (2023): 257-284.

Luna Dolezal and Amelia DeFalco, “Raised by Robots: Imagining Posthuman ‘Maternal’ Touch.” Mapping the Posthuman, edited by Grant Hamilton and Carolyn Lau. Routledge, 2023.

Amelia DeFalco and Luna Dolezal, “What is Affective Technotouch (and Why Does it Matter)?” Senses and Society 18.2 (2023): 85–91.

Amelia DeFalco “Posthuman Care and Posthumous Life.” Critical Humanities and Ageing: Forging Interdisciplinary Dialogues. Ed. Marlene Goldman, Thomas Cole and Kate de Medeiros. New York: Routledge, 2022.

Amelia DeFalco “Toward a Theory of Posthuman Care: Real Humans and Caring Robots.” Body & Society 26.3 (2020): 31-60.2. Imagining

Technologies for Disability Futures

Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures is a multidisciplinary and multi-institution research project, led by Professor Murray, focusing on the relationship between cultural and artistic imaginings of disability technologies (such as prosthetics and other assistive technologies) and their design, production and use in engineering and healthcare settings. We are exploring the boundaries and processes that constitute disability futures, looking at how ideas of imagining, engineering, design, selfhood, embodiment, and care shape the production and meaning of disability, augmentation and enhancement. We are also interested in the ways in which the various narratives that represent augmented/enhanced futures are framed within contemporary ideas – posthuman, transhuman, biohybrid, robot – that might articulate disability experiences within the development of health technologies and cultures.

Publications can be found on the project website.