Select Publications

‘Posthuman Care and Posthumous Life’
2022 | Amelia DeFalco | in Critical Humanities and Ageing: Forging Interdisciplinary Dialogues ed. by Goldman M, Cole T and de Medeiros K.

Toward a Theory of Posthuman Care: Real Humans and Caring Robots
2020 | Amelia DeFalco | Body and Society
This essay interrogates the common assumption that good care is necessarily human care.The essay reads speculative representations of robot care, particularly the Swedish television programme Äkta människor (Real Humans), alongside ethics of care philosophy and critical posthumanism to highlight their synergetic critiques of neoliberal affective economies and humanist hierarchies that treat some bodies and affects as more real than others. Read more

Beyond Prosthetic Memory: Posthumanism, Embodiment, and Caregiving Robots
2017 | Amelia DeFalco | Age Culture Humanities
This essay considers the social, cultural and ethical implications of robotic care alongside a particular speculative representation of posthuman care, the 2012 film Robot and Frank. Read more.

MaddAddam, Biocapitalism, and Affective Things
2017 | Amelia DeFalco | Contemporary Women’s Writing
This essay considers the ethical dimensions of Atwood’s recent speculative fiction, the MaddAddam trilogy (2003–14), alongside a framework that Nikolas Rose, Sunder Rajan, and others term as biocapitalism. Read more.
Research Activities and News
- Futures of Care Symposium at the Thackray Museum of Medicine
- Half-term fun with robots at the Thackray Museum of Medicine
- “The idea of the autonomous robot disguises all the human labour behind it”: An Interview with Teresa Heffernan
- Can Robots Care? Exhibition Launch at the Thackray Museum of Medicine
- “Let the robots do the heavy lifting!” A Blog Post for the Thackray Museum of Medicine
- An Interview with Conor McGinn
- Dr Amelia DeFalco speaks to Gayle Lofthouse on BBC Leeds
- ‘Can Robots Care? No, an unequivocal no’: An Interview with Robot Ethicist Aimee van Wynsberghe
- Call for Papers: Futures of Care Symposium