At the Technosomata conference at the University of Exeter in June 2019 Kazuki Yamada was invited to give a response to Margrit Shildrick’s ‘Feeling Technology: The Significance of Empathy Robots’.

Abstract: This paper responds to Margrit Shildrick’s discussion on the use of so-called ‘empathy robots’ in the care of older people as an opportunity to expand and reframe notions of selfhood beyond the boundaries of the physical body. I discuss and analyse the implications of Shildrick’s contentions through four lenses: (1) embodied selfhood and relationality from a dementia studies perspective; (2) theorising human-non-human relations in the context of non-Western worldviews such as the Japanese; (3) dementia and sexuality; and (4) economic, geographic, and racial privilege.