Select Publications

A detail of the film poster for Marjorie Prime

‘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.

A still from the television series Real Humans, depicting a line of humanoid synthetic robots

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

A detail from the film poster of Robot and Frank, depicting a robot looking up at a man

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.

A detail from the front cover of Margaret Atwood's book Maddaddam, depicting a pink pig and a green bird

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.

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