CHANSE Call Partner Search Tool

General Information

• Project title: Circuits of Care: AI Kinship in Speculative Fiction
• Type: Project looking for partner
• Organisation: Umeå University
• Country: Sweden (SE)

Research area

• Call theme: Crisis - Perspectives from the Humanities
• Keywords:

  artificial intelligence; critical kinship theory; gender; labour of care; speculative fiction

• Brief description of your expertise / expertise you are looking for:

  We are primarily looking for partners with a background/interest in literature studies and particularly speculative fiction, but are also open to contributions from partners with a background in media studies, sociology and AI research, in particular with a focus on AI and care.

• Brief description of your project / the project you would like to join:

  Artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly central to most aspects of human life, including the ones we tend to think of as most intimately human: those of care, nurture, and love. As developments in AI research push at borders between human and non-human, there is an urgent need to engage both imaginatively and critically with potential possibilities and problems of such developments. This project will employ the concept of kinship, examining these narratives through critical kinship theory. Kinship underpins the state, functioning as a social, legal, and emotional web in a society, regulating not just who is responsible for providing everyday care or making life-or-death decisions, but also who is recognized as a citizen and as a person. Thus, an analysis of how AI is imagined as entering kinship formations in contemporary speculative fiction narratives effectively focuses our attention to points where AI becomes entangled with intimately human concerns, while also allowing for an analysis of how these concerns interplay with current social challenges, especially of a demographic nature – aging populations, decreasing fertility and birth rates.  

Berit Åström

• Organisation: Umeå University
• Position: Associate Professor
• E-mail: berit.astrom@umu.se
• Phone: 0730316556
• Web: www.umu.se/en/staff/berit-astrom/