Robots, like any technology, are not “objective” or “universal”; instead, machines reveal the process of social formation. This talk by poet, scholar, and new media artist Margaret Rhee demonstrates how forms of difference—such as race, gender, and sexuality—are shaped by and co-constitutive with technological developments. Specifically, Rhee illustrates how the robot is a locus of racialization for Asian Americans within modernity’s distinction between humans and machines.

Rhee is the author of Love, Robot, named a 2017 Best Book of Poetry by Entropy Magazine and awarded a 2018 Elgin Award by the Science Fiction Poetry Association and the 2019 Best Book Award in Poetry by the Asian American Studies Association.

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Presented by the Berkeley Center for New Media; cosponsored by the Departments of Ethnic Studies and Comparative Literature.