Shifting Contexts: 50 Years of Science and Technology Studies

A CULTURE OF CARE ROBOTS

Mitali Thakor keeps a gray and white cat in her office as part of her new research project. It meows and rolls over, and when you stroke its back, it purrs. But it doesn’t shed. It doesn’t need a litter box. It’s an “animate companion,” a realistic, battery-operated doll meant to provide fellowship and comfort to adults with dementia.

A cultural anthropologist, Thakor is investigating so-called care robots. As the United States faces health care and education funding cuts and a loneliness epidemic, companies are developing and marketing robotic and animatronic devices for use in childcare, elder care, and intimacy. Thakor’s fieldwork takes her to labs and offices, where she shadows and interviews designers, engineers, and executives. “I also read a lot of science fiction and speculative fiction,” she says, because many robotics designers do too. “They’re constantly referencing science fiction in our interviews, and a lot of their science fiction reading influences the way they design robots.”

Underlying her project are political, ethical, and economic questions. “Health care is being gutted and privatized. People are losing access to meaningful forms of institutional care,” she says. “Are robots and AI being brought in as stopgaps to temporarily fix a long-term problem and for regulatory bodies to avoid fixing that problem? Or are they part of a large-scale solution?”

The research grew out of her STS course Queer Robotics: Cyborgs in Science Fiction and Anthropology. As part of that class, Thakor—an assistant professor of STS; anthropology; and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies—introduces students to various care robots, including a small, blue AI device that employs facial recognition to teach kids emotional cues. Other care robots are designed as homework helpers, friends, therapists, or romantic partners. One surprising finding: The technology is often simple. “They may have very limited capacity,” Thakor says. “But that doesn’t seem to impact people’s ability to develop an intimate relationship with them.”

That insight has helped lead Thakor to explore the history of dolls and play therapy, and to new questions: “How do we think about humans’ attachments to inanimate or semi-inanimate objects as a legitimate site for caring relationships? And if the caring dynamic is possible with a lower-tech model, then what does it mean to be constantly having companies selling us high-tech AI models?” 

Thakor hopes to also observe how people use care robots. Recently, designers were excited to show her a new feature that comes with the cat: a tiny pet-grooming brush. “It’s in the act of this robot caring for you that the person now feels like they can offer care in return,” Thakor says. “That reciprocity is really important to how we think about meaningful care.”

A HISTORY OF METABOLISM CAGES

Anthony Hatch was reading Medical Apartheid, a book by Harriet A. Washington about the history of medical experimentation on Black Americans, when he came across a passing reference to a metabolism cage. “I had written a whole book on metabolism and another whole book on prisons, and I had never heard of a metabolism cage,” says Hatch, a professor of STS and African American studies, and a former chair of STS who now directs Wesleyan’s Center for the Humanities.

Hatch’s curiosity led him to 19th-century Wesleyan alumnus and professor Wilbur Atwater, class of 1865, whose “respiration calorimeter” measured human metabolism. Inside Judd Hall, this sealed cabinet was large enough to hold a person for days of study. Atwater’s first human subject was a Swedish immigrant who worked in Judd as a custodian. Hatch came to understand the Atwater apparatus as one kind of metabolism cage—a specialized laboratory enclosure that holds an animal for study while precisely measuring how the animal processes matter. “It’s something very few people have heard of, but once you start to talk about it, you begin to recognize it in various ways,” Hatch says. 

Hatch went on to write a chapter about the intersections of race and metabolism cages in The Racial Cage, a new book he coauthored. Now he’s working with students in Black Box Labs—the STS research and training lab he codirects with Thakor—to write a 200-year history of the metabolism cage. “We’re exploring the design, ethics, and social features of metabolism cages,” he says. “It’s a history of technology project.” It covers, for example, a secret US military research program in the early 2000s that, Hatch says, aimed to alter soldiers’ metabolism so they could go without food, sleep, and bathrooms for longer. “It’s a project in biomanipulation and biohacking—hacking the body.”

Hatch hopes the study of metabolism cages will bring new understanding of the use of caged animals—human and otherwise—in scientific research. In that understanding, he says, “we might be able to think about how free animals need to operate, where we’re not living underneath a system that confines, that holds, that captures, but rather something different.”

DIABETES: AN ETHNOGRAPHY

Mexico reached a grim milestone in 2016 when diabetes became the country’s leading cause of death. As public health experts tackled the problem, a key strategy emerged: The nation’s health care system would focus on treating prediabetes. Prescribe medicine to people whose blood glucose levels are just below the threshold for the disease and you delay its onset—sounds straightforward, right?

Not to Emily Vasquez. An assistant professor of STS and sociology, Vasquez uses ethnography—the systematic study of cultures—to explore medicine and public health as tools of global power and areas of social struggle, foundational concerns of STS. To Vasquez, each pill swallowed for prediabetes represents a series of political choices. “It’s good to engage with these politics, rather than to push them aside as if there were no politics involved in science,” she says.

She wondered: Why focus on individual treatment rather than on societal factors that contribute to diabetes, such as race and class? Why not look at food policy, too? Who benefits from these choices? What inequalities do they reproduce?

“There was a time in Mexican history when understandings of what public health could be and the state’s role in supporting population health were particularly radical and revolutionary,” Vasquez says. “But as has taken place in most parts of the world, public health has become medicalized. It has lost much of the social justice, social reform framework it once had and is now more akin to medical practice.” 

Vasquez was particularly surprised by Mexico’s strategy given that the country’s health care system was already overtaxed, with many full-blown Type 2 diabetes patients undiagnosed or undertreated. “The plan to treat prediabetes further burdens the clinical capacity,” she says. In Mexico City, she also spent time with activists working on the margins who lobbied for a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages, comparing their efforts and motivations to those of politically influential philanthropists who have promoted biomedical and tech-based solutions, such as apps and devices that detect and monitor prediabetes.

Her research frames Mexico’s diabetes strategy as “non-disruptive,” meaning it does not challenge the structural drivers of poor health or the wealth inequality that, she says, fuels health philanthropy in Mexico and beyond. As Vasquez shows, treating individuals is far from a straightforward solution.

A SKEPTIC’S VIEW OF LAB-GROWN MEAT

Animal rights and climate activists have long touted the benefits of a plant-based diet, but convincing the average person to give up meat is no easy sell. That tension has helped drive interest in lab-grown meat, also known as cultivated or cultured meat: real animal muscle tissue—not a plant-based imitation—that was grown by scientists for human consumption and was never part of a sentient being that went from farm to slaughterhouse.

“The appeal is that you can have your cake and eat it too,” says Elan Abrell, assistant professor of STS, environmental studies, and anthropology, and coordinator of Wesleyan’s animal studies minor.

Abrell studies the political, economic, and ethical dimensions of the cultured meat industry and how they intersect with animal activism. Initially, he says, “I kind of bought into the sales pitch.” But as he looked at cultured meat companies in the broader context of Silicon Valley tech startups, he came to believe the most likely outcome is that investors will lose interest before companies can produce lab-grown meat at scale.

“The more research I did, the more cynical and critical I got about it,” he says.
Part of the reason for his cynicism is that producing lab-grown meat is expensive and complicated. Right now, it’s available only in a handful of high-end restaurants and at one Singapore butcher shop. As a way to keep the price more reasonable, the latter sells “tiny bits of cultured chicken mixed in with plant-based protein,” Abrell says, “and it still costs something like 10 times as much as chicken.”

Abrell thinks about meat itself as a technology that humans have developed over time, starting with the creation of hunting tools and the discovery of fire and extending through advances in refrigeration and the rise of factory farming. “I’m looking at the cultured meat industry as the newest node in that long trajectory,” he says.

The research has also led him to a future project. When presenting his work, Abrell noticed that audience members often asked whether human tissue could be cultivated to eat. “I don’t know why people’s minds go to cannibalism,” Abrell says, but it happened often enough that he started to wonder: Did audience questions indicate a deeper fascination or anxiety around cannibalism? And how does that tie into anthropology’s colonial-era history of exaggerating the frequency and scale of human cannibalism?

“Something catalyzed in my mind,” Abrell says, “and I realized: This could be a research project.” It will also be a future Wesleyan class, a sort of sequel to Eating Others, his current STS course on animals. The title of the new course: “Eating Ourselves.”