Delivery Drone Fictions: Conceiving Transportation and Logistics as Care Work
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.
Date: 16 October 2025, 16:45
Venue: Rothermere American Institute, 1A South Parks Road OX1 3UB
Venue Details: Downstairs Seminar Room
Speaker: J.D. Schnepf (University of Groningen))
Organising department: Faculty of English Language and Literature
Organisers: Antoine Traisnel (University of Oxford), Professor Nicole King (University of Oxford)
Part of: American Literature Research Seminar
Booking required?: Not required
Audience: Members of the University only
Editors: Katy Terry, Hope Lukonyomoi-Otunnu