Rachel Jacobs

Robo-Humanities is led by Dr Alan Chamberlain, at its core Robo-Humanities brings together Robotics, AI and the Arts and Humanities to start to understand, design, and explore Robotics and AI from a more human, subjective perspective. By bringing together understandings of technology in the humanities from literature and film to history and theology, we want to explore the ways that this impacts upon the ways that we see intelligent embodied technologies, such as robots in our everyday world. Are there benefits in understanding how cultural perceptions and physical experiences shape our relationship with robots — and how these factors influence whether, how, and why we adopt robotic technologies? Can we use examples from the history to show and explain ways that new technologies have been designed and adopted, what are the opportunities and barriers to robots entering our homes? And are there interdisciplinary ways of understanding and researching in the humanities that we can expand upon and use in exciting and innovative ways to create sensory robotics and experiences that are yet to be fully understood? We will bring people and ideas together to challenge the traditional views of the humanities in robotics to create new ways of thinking and shaping the future of human-robot interaction.

We will develop an inclusive Robo-Humanities community that will bring people from a range of disciplines spanning the arts, humanities, social sciences, science and technology. This will enable us to create new projects and support the Somabotics portfolio from a range of critical perspectives allowing us to develop new approaches to exploring and developing robotics. A key part of the project will be developing a cutting-edge approach, working with a range of artists and humanities-based scholars, looking at new and novel ways to translate our research into engagement activities for the public, and developing materials that may be of use to policy makers and influencers.

Outputs:

Woycicki, P., Chamberlain, A., & Borokini, F. (2025). Artificial Intelligence (AI) and contemporary performance: developing an arts & humanities approach to AI. International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, 21(2), 227–239. https://doi.org/10.1080/14794713.2025.2552603