Call for Contributions

Call for Contributions - GenR 2022 Workshop @RO-MAN 2022 - Gendering Robots: Intersectional Feminist Perspectives on Gender in Social Robotics

This year’s GenR workshop aims to provide a space for collaborative discussion, critical reflection, and creativity to find opportunities to break with normative research practices in robotics methodology and robot design from an intersectional perspective.

Our spotlight theme for this year’s workshop is Intersectional Feminism. Kimberle Crenshaw first introduced intersectionality as a term to describe the discriminatory effects of race and gender, which cannot be understood in isolation as they amplify and resonate with each other. Crenshaw and other feminists have since developed intersectionality as a framework to understand the interaction of social markers such as gender, race, class, disability, and their effects on social phenomena. The HRI literature has extensively shown that social robots, especially humanoid ones, are exposed to the same social categorisation processes that affect humans. The integration of social robots in the political dimensions and social categories of society demands a deeper engagement with their potential dangers and opportunities.

Instead of a regular call for papers, the GenR 2022 workshop team invites contributions describing ambitious, out of the box ideas to break with normative practices in Social Robotics and HRI, as well as creative visions for the future of social robotics and critical reflections about its present from an intersectional lens.

We invite you to submit EITHER a one-page written submission describing an idea, reflection, or vision (no template or pre-defined format), OR a media contribution (i.e., short 5-min videos, pictorial, drawing, sketche, design) depicting an idea, reflection, or vision in a more artistic way. We do not set any limit to creativity, but rather invite you to experiment!

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

  • Gendering practices in social robotics

  • Intersectional feminist robotics

  • Robot’s gender design

  • Norm-critical design

  • Queer design in HRI

  • Sex Robots

  • Ethics of gendered robots

  • Societal implications and applications of gendered robots

  • Performative arts encompassing a reflection on gender in robotics

  • LGBTQIA+ perspectives on robot gender

  • Marginalised perspectives on gender in HRI

  • Queering Robots

  • Queer identities in HRI

  • Black in Robotics

  • Disability in Robotics

  • Research methods to foster gender diversity in HRI studies

  • Critical design of gendered robots


Important dates

  • July 8th, 2022 - submission deadline

  • August 5th, 2022 - notification of selection

  • August 29th, 2022 - workshop day (morning CEST)

Submissions will be checked for alignment to the workshop’s themes and goals. In case we receive more submissions than we can showcase, we will perform a light review of the contributions. The selected contributors will be invited to participate in round table sessions or spotlight presentations on the day of the workshop.

Written and media contributions can be submitted pressing the button below.