Jasmine Erdener

Overview

I finished my second master's degree and PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2019. After completing the PhD, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center on Digital Culture and Society at Annenberg in 2019-2020. In the fall of 2020, I moved to Istanbul to accept a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Media and Visual Arts at Koç University.

My current book manuscript critically examines Western technological ideologies behind robots, AI, and cyborgs, and contrasts them with a very different set of agential objects: puppets. Puppetry offers an alternative model of communication and political engagement for technology, based on agency, cooperation, and collectivity. As technologies become increasingly human-like, through their affect, appearance, or even insertion into the body, I examine how gender, race, and disability are made visible or invisible, and the consequences for people using these technologies. Finally, I draw from media archaeology, feminist science fiction and Afrofuturist practitioners to envision how puppetry and other ways of imagining human-machine interaction could lead to more equitable technological futures.

My second book project focuses on the burgeoning field of “thanabots” or digital resurrection technologies which combine AI and an individual’s social media data, online consumer profile, text messages, emails, even oral history interviews, to create a digital replica of the deceased. I met and interviewed the robot Bina48, a robot built to replicate a living woman, Bina Rothblatt. Bina48’s developers are trying to encode the robot with an understanding of racial and gendered identity, to reflect Bina Rothblatt’s experiences of life as an African American woman in the US. In this project, I examine how big data, surveillance, and the racialized and gendered body intersect with this technological vision of life after death.

Research areas

Media Studies , Communication , Digital Culture , Social Movements , Feminist Science and Technology Studies , Surveillance Studies

Education

Links

Personal Site Google Scholar ORCID