OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, 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.