Postdisciplinary Robotics: Cultural Robotics as aSite for the Future of Sociocultural Machines

In anticipation for ICSR 2026, a manuscript on the future of Cultural Robotics is being prepared for consideration. Here’s the working abstract:

Robotics is a hybrid field that necessarily integrates a multiplicity of disciplinary knowledges, including psychology, design, and ethics. As social-cultural agents, robots are embedded within human values, rituals, and social imaginaries. This paper explores the relationship between robots and culture and proposes a postdisciplinary approach to robotics as a site for inclusive and pluriversal research and practice. This approach is not a rejection of the traditional scholarly and academic disciplinary boundary of robotics, but a renewal: a call to reimagine robots as an ecology of knowledge capable of responding to the complex realities of human and planetary futures.

Google’s NotebookLM provides a summary, animated into a video using Adobe Podcast: