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We aim to cultivate the workshop as a space in which HRI and social sciences scholars, designers, practitioners, and artists can critically address the status quo and collectively experiment with new trajectories and genres of HRI research and design. Through the workshop themes, we mobilize the field’s circulating affects — metaphorically grounded through cruel optimism, lucid despair and precarious hope — as explicit resources that reinstate the agency of HRI researchers, end-users, and publics, thereby advancing the HRI 2026 theme, HRI Empowering Society.
cruel Optimism
For us, the first step toward reorienting toward the politics of robotics and HRI is to recognize the dominant narratives that sustain the field: the stories of progress, inevitability, and benevolent automation that shape how we imagine our work, its purposes, and its possibilities. We understand these attachments as a form of cruel optimism — sustaining fantasies that both motivate and constrain us, keeping us invested in trajectories that may no longer serve collective flourishing.
Martim Brandão is a Lecturer in Robotics and Autonomous Systems in the Department of Informatics at King's College London. Martim's goal is to contribute to the responsible development of robotics and AI. Towards this, he systematically investigates the risks and social impact of robotics and AI, critically examines current approaches to R&D in the field, and develops new algorithms towards more socially just and human-compatible technologies.
Lucid Despair
The second step involves confronting what happens when those sustaining narratives begin to crack. We call this orientation lucid despair. Rather than treating despair as an endpoint, we understand it as a way of seeing more clearly what no longer works, and of resisting the impulse to simply repair or move on too quickly. Drawing on Langdon Winner’s notion of epistemic Luddism, we approach despair as an opportunity to unplug — to pause, refuse, or discontinue practices that perpetuate harm, exhaustion, or complicity. Through this orientation, we invite participants to inhabit discomfort and uncertainty as spaces of insight and resistance rather than paralysis.
Andrew Hundt is a Computing Innovation Fellow at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He researches human-centered processes, metrics, and algorithms that respect human rights and human needs in AI and Robotics. He earned the competitively-awarded Computing Innovation Fellow (CIFellow) sponsored by the Computing Research Association and National Science Foundation, and is at Carnegie Mellon's Robotics Institute working with Prof. Jean Oh. He has quantitatively demonstrated race and gender bias in Robot Learning. His publications extensively critique the ways in which gender and race are addressed in HRI research. He also works on the critical analysis of HRI in relation to disabled people. His recent publication focuses on how LLM-driven robots risk enacting discrimination, violence, and unlawful actions.
Precarious Hope
The third step, precarious hope, gestures toward the search for difference. We understand hope not as naïve optimism about better futures, but as a fragile, deliberate and precarious practice of inhabiting the present otherwise. Where despair opens the space of refusal, hope holds generative potential: the tentative crafting of new genres of research and design, new collaborative formats, and new ways of thinking, making, and feeling together. In this sense, hope becomes both a method and a collective experiment, a way of reimagining how HRI, as a field and community, could be otherwise.
David J. Bailey is an Associate Professor in politics at the University of Birmingham. His research and teaching focuses on the political economy of capitalism, with a focus on the different ways in which capitalism is contested. He is a co-founder of the contentious politics of AI network in the university of Birmingham and his research includes how different applications of AI can be contested.
Emanuel Gollob who is also part of the organizing team, is an artist and researcher in the Creative Robotics department at the University of Arts Linz. He explores the relationships between humans, artificial intelligence and robots, aiming to make alternative ones bodily experienceable. Emanuel´s work has been exhibited at the Smithsonian Arts + Industries Building in Washington, D.C., the Science Gallery Melbourne, and the ArtScience Museum in Singapore.
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