On 28th November OxTalks will move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events' (full details are available on the Staff Gateway).
There will be an OxTalks freeze beginning on Friday 14th November. This means you will need to publish any of your known events to OxTalks by then as there will be no facility to publish or edit events in that fortnight. During the freeze, all events will be migrated to the new Oxford Events site. It will still be possible to view events on OxTalks during this time.
If you have any questions, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Why do popular narratives of automated drone delivery so often feature mothers, midwives, and babysitters? To answer this question, this talk takes at its starting point the tech industry claim that advances in artificial intelligence and robotics promise to relieve reproductive and domestic laborers from the drudgery of menial tasks. Unencumbered from these obligations, we’re told, humans are free to reach their full potential. As feminist scholars remind us, however, this vision of automation regards the gendered and racialized workers who historically perform devalued tasks under racial capitalism as less than human. Moreover, despite industry forecasts of human obsolescence, the automated workplace hasn’t eliminated human labor so much as degraded it: workers are routinely subjected to unsafe conditions, sped-up production schedules, and unreliable work hours. This talk examines how science fiction offers an uneven critique of racial capitalism’s violence and degradation by way of its global shipping networks. Specifically, through tales of drones performing automated gestational and post-gestational labor, this talk argues that science fiction tests the biopolitical limits of transportation and logistics as gendered, reproductive care work.