Virtual Reality (VR) is a technology that allows immersion and embodiment. It makes it possible for someone to transcend the confines of their own body and adopt another character’s point of view. Clouds over Sidra (2015), a 360-degree documentary video produced by the United Nations, provides such a virtual experience. It allows viewers to peek into the life of 12-year-old Sidra, a Syrian refugee housed in the Za'atari refugee camp in Jordan, home to 130,000 Syrians fleeing violence and war. In his popular Ted Talk, Chris Milk (2015), one of the makers, states: 

 

 

As Rosi Braidotti writes bodies are not only a socially constructed entity, but an embodied, embedded, relational and affective portal to the world. The embodied self, far from being the unitary point of epistemological verification of lived experiences, turns into a crowd of human and non-human housemates. For this reason, VR has been postulated as a ‘technology of feelings’, one that promotes compassion, connection and intimacy by allowing the viewer to experience the lives of other humans, for example distant sufferers such as migrants or refugees.

Humanitarian VR productions, such as Clouds over Sidra, celebrate the value of the embodied presence of other humans simulated by this advanced technology. Yet, critics point out to the inherent bias of the technology itself as “humanitarian VR is an ambivalent sensory experience of bodily absence triggered by its technological limits” (Zimanyi and Ben Ayoun, 2019). Humanitarian VR should seek to move beyond provoking feelings on the part of the spectator to raising the possibility of tangible action outside of the representative space, in order to avoid ceremonial cosmopolitanism.

This intervention intends to explore how ‘human’ is the human in humanitarian communication and whether the unprecedented success and efforts of UN VR campaigns for example, do not risk fabricating new ideas of the human that inherently disempower, dehumanize and infantilize the distant others, rethought as proximate and alike humans. The drive for innovation and technosolutionism should be understood within a socio-critical context in which humans from different backgrounds are considered, avoiding easy universalism and stereotypes. 

This article has a double aim: it contributes to the emerging paradigm of literary gerontology by borrowing theories from posthumanism and revisits the relation between posthumanism and affect with regard to the lives of older adults. Changanti Tulasi’s short story “Sunstroke” (1977) conceptualizes this relation and illuminates on the one hand, how in the twenty-first century, a gradual deviation towards posthuman social condition challenges the stereotypical portrayals of older adults as ‘nonperson’ and ‘immaterial’ and on the other, problematizes the materiality and beyond-the-human aspect of ageing, calling for an all-inclusive and age-friendly environment. “Sunstroke” foregrounds the entangled life of an aged individual with a non-human material entity or artefact that turns into an external manifestation of the users’ subjectivity. The novelty of the paper lies in its ability to bring out how the short story concedes on these artefacts' agency to create an affective reality for the aged individual thereby clearly bringing the human/nonhuman distinction on the same level of existence. The paper argues that these material entities are not only responsible for ageing realities and experiences, but they are all capable of agency and can co-evolve together, emphasising a more-than-human approach in ageing studies. The novel may be conceived to be a commentary on the emerging discourse in the domain of literary gerontology that aims to cognize the complex interplay between the human and nonhuman world that is transformed into a non-animate subject by the experientialities of the individuals possessing those artefacts. The subjective experientialities relate to the concept of sensitive objects as explored in knowledge domains such as life-course study, material gerontology, and material culture. The paper draws on critical perspectives from posthuman affect and immaterial bodies to contend on the affective experientialities of older adults that emerge as a result of the interaction between humans and non-animate beings. 

 

Getting to Know You: How Artificial is Engineered Friendship?

Sparked by the use of robots to provide care for the elderly in Japan, several questions have (re)surfaced regarding relationships between the human and more-than-human and about the engineering of friendship and empathy. AI and robots are also increasingly deployed in mental health settings, for instance, to provide psychotherapy or to detect and treat autism. In many of these contexts, robots are expected to engage in relationships with humans, thus foregrounding the centrality of the more-than-human in the generation and circulation of affect. Several cultural and spiritual traditions across the world acknowledge and, indeed, center the agentive capacity of objects, animals, spirits, and landscapes as well as the affective relationships that form between the more-than-human and humans: they problematize assumptions that agency and affect are unique to human beings. 

My presentation draws on my previous research on the affective labor of call center workers in India and my new project on algorithms and emotions. Recent debates regarding robots and humanoids query their ability to engage in affective relationships, in particular, those based on empathy and friendship; they also construct narratives of futurity that interrogate the place of the human vis-à-vis the machine, robots, and AI. Some of these debates have shaped popular fiction, for instance, novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun (which builds on his earlier book, Never Let Me Go, a poignant indictment of Enlightenment conceptions of knowledge) and Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me. Both these novels focus on friendships forged between humans, humanoids, and robots, and, in the process, they develop narratives of futurity predicated on dominant discourses regarding relationships between the human, the more-than-human, and machines. 

In my paper, I reflect on how these narratives of futurity compel us to rethink the centrality of empathy to what we consider “the human.” I stage a dialogue between anthropological scholarship on cross-cultural understandings of empathy on the one hand and, on the other, novels like Machines Like Me and Klara and the Sun to ask: how artificial is engineered friendship? How does the ability of robots and humanoids to engage in empathetic relationships with humans compel us to rethink the boundaries between us and the more-than-human?