Jenny Carla Moran

AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership /Cambridge European & Newnham College Scholarship

Loveability

Supervisor: Professor Sarah Dillon (Faculty of English, University of Cambridge)

Abstract:

My research is concerned with emerging technologies. I focus on humanoid robots designed for relations of love as a kind of archive of normative assumptions – how should a “loveable” humanoid robot look, move, and respond to the user in order to be accepted, and what does this tell us about how we think about other humans? I take a critical approach to this, problematising instances in which loved, non-living objects become narratively represented as deserving of rights and protection. I am concerned with this narrative positioning precisely because the same care is not directed toward all living beings equally. In my thesis, I propose an alternative colonial hierarchy of liveliness organised by love projected onto living and non-living things.

Biography:

I am an Affiliated Lecturer for the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, supervising MPhil in Multi-disciplinary Gender Studies students and POLIS undergraduates. I hold a first-class honours BA in English Studies from Trinity College, University of Dublin, and an MA in Postcolonial Studies from SOAS, University of London.
My research interests include decolonial and postcolonial theory, futurism/the “TESCREAL” bundle, affect theory, queer theory, science fiction, intimacy and love, humanoid robot design, posthumanism, anthropomorphisation, and political influences upon what is seen as alive. I use she/her pronouns, I like ghost stories, and I regularly hang out with an extended family of semi-feral cats.