Keio University X Dignity Center

Robot Care Futures
9.30-11am (GMT), 29 January 2026 (Online)

Organised as part of the “Reimagining Lifecourse” project at Keio University X Dignity Centre, Japan & Medical Humanities Research Group Seminar at the University of Leeds, this seminar explores robot care and what possibilities it may offer for futures of care and for care with dignity.

Mark Paterson, “Empathy by Design: The affective politics of ‘Empathy Theatre’ in Human–Robot Interaction”
Luna Dolezal, “Striving for Presence on a Hospital Ward: Phenomenology & Re-Embodiment for a Nurse-Operated Telepresence Robot”
Amelia DeFalco, “Reading Care Robots: Exploring the Relationship between Cultural and Engineering Imaginaries”
Sarah Falcus, Respondent / Q&A
Organiser/Chair: Katsura Sako

Mark Paterson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh. He has an interest in the history and science of bodily sensation, and technologies of the senses. He is author of books including The Senses of Touch: Haptics, Affects and Technologies (Routledge, 2007), Seeing with the Hands: Blindness, Vision and Touch After Descartes (Edinburgh UP, 2016), and How We Became Sensorimotor: Movement, Measurement, Sensation (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), most recently Affective Touching: Neurobiology and Technological Applications (Cambridge UP, 2025). He is co-editor of a special issue of ACM Transactions in Human-Robot Interaction (2023), ‘Designing the Robot Body: Critical Perspectives on Affective Embodied Interaction’. His current research is concerned with the role of embodiment in the histories of human-robot interactions. His research website is http://sensory-motor.com 

Luna Dolezal is Professor of Philosophy and Medical Humanities at the University of Exeter, based in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy and Anthropology and the Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. Her work is primarily in the areas of applied phenomenology and medical humanities, and she has researched emerging technologies such as robotics, self-tracking technologies and social AI. She is PI of the Shame and Medicine Project and Co-I on the Imagining Technologies for Disabilities Futures (itDf) Project. She is author of The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism and the Socially Shaped Body (Lexington Books, 2015), co-author of Covid-19 and Shame: Political Emotions and Public Health in the UK (Bloomsbury, 2023), and co-editor of the books Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters (SUNY Press, 2017) and New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment (Palgrave, 2018).

Amelia DeFalco is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Leeds. Her research concerns representations of aging, care, technology and the posthuman in contemporary cultural narratives. She is author of Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative (Ohio State University Press 2010), Imagining Care: Responsibility, Dependency, and Canadian Literature (University of Toronto Press 2016) and Curious Kin in Fictions of Posthuman Care (winner of the 2023 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize) (Oxford University Press) and co-editor of Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro (Palgrave 2018).

Sarah Falcus is a researcher in literary and age studies. She is the co-editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook to Ageing in Contemporary Literature and Film (with Raquel Medina and Heike Hartung, 2023) and Contemporary Narratives of Ageing, Illness, Care (with Katsura Sako, 2021). Her current work centres around space, age and generation, with a particular focus on the garden as explored in literary and cultural texts.

The seminar is free and open to all. Please register before 5pm (GMT), 27 January 2026, using the google form: https://forms.gle/g2qgZvUDJbCom5iL6

For inquiries, contact Katsura Sako (k.sako@keio.jp).