Surrogate Humanity

“Surrogate Humanity is a stunning, original analysis of the fantasies, surrogacies, and technologies of ‘the human’ that uphold present-day racial capitalism and empire. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora examine ‘technoliberal’ projects that promise revolutionary liberation from labor inequality, and demonstrate their centrality to the social reproduction of the very dispossessions, differences, and exploitations they seek to transcend. An examination of the close relationship of automation, robotics, media platforms, drones, and artificial intelligence to U.S. racial logics, this is an indispensable book for feminist studies of science and technology, race and colonialism, and critiques of liberalism.” - Lisa Lowe, author of The Intimacies of Four Continents

“With clarity and force, Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora intervene into the formulations of human---machine interaction by tracking how race, colonialism, and patriarchy are woven into the fabric of robots, thereby bringing urgent scholarship on antiblackness, settler colonialism, and the racial structures of labor into the center of technoscience. The world needs this superb book!” - Michelle Murphy, author of The Economization of Life

“Throughout their work, at the end of each chapter, Atanasoski and Vora offer glimpses into what the technological future can look like when it resists the problems they foreground... and it is this resistance that needs further exploration.” - Chad A. B. Wilson, Journal of American Culture

“By bringing a much more nuanced reading of race, gender, and difference to science and technology studies, Atanasoski and Vora provoke us to think more deeply about how our imagined technological futures always already serve to reproduce our most problematic pasts—and what forms or processes can disrupt and transcend these. This is a vital project that should speak to us all.” - Barbara Herr Harthorn, American Ethnologist

“Surrogate Humanity...confirm[s] that the human is a contingent concept.... The authors also spotlight how contemporary discourses concerning automation, in particular, alternately promise liberation and threaten debasement while eliding the roles of racialized and colonial subjects in producing the technologies and materials on which automation relies.” - Rebecah Pulsifer, Women's Studies Quarterly

“Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora’s Surrogate Humanity is a wide-ranging and ambitious analysis of the relationships between labor practices, artificial intelligence, and other technologies in modern society.... Labor and critical AI researchers will appreciate the scope of the book and its examination of the digital work and the gig economy in particular.” - Andrea Flores, Information & Culture

“...Surrogate Humanity usefully provides examples from literary, artistic, engineering, and scientific projects that critique or outright refuse technoliberalism’s frame for recognizing full humanity. These rebellious acts of imagination show us that the potential exists to develop alternative designs and trajectories for technological development ... in ways that prioritize equity and justice.” - Anita Lam, Surveillance & Society

“Surrogate Humanity is a fascinating and important book that provides a much-needed counter narrative to prevailing approaches in science and technology studies.... Complemented by their mode of collaborative writing as a radical feminist act, the book is thus certain to inspire scholars and activists alike....” - Sibille Merz, Ethnic and Racial Studies

“Surrogate Humanity is an insightful analysis of humanity’s relationship to technology under racial capitalism.... The book draws attention to theoretical, activist and artistic efforts to create technologies outside of the use, productivity and value paradigm of racial capitalism. These alternate human-robot relationships offer a glimmer of hope and encouragement for ongoing resistance against racial capitalism.” - Raquel Bosó Pérez, Sociology of Health & Illness

“...Surrogate Humanity takes readers on a rapid tour of six different emerging technological settings: racialized labor struggles, the sharing economy, the automation of service work, the design of robot emotion, warfare, and sex robots.... [It is] a provocative book that forcefully demonstrates the potential of the disciplinary interface of STS and critical race theory.” - Danya Glabau, BioSocieties

“Atanasoski and Vora’s major intervention in the automation debate is their argument that automation imaginaries are shaped by liberal humanism and the racial hierarchies embedded in it.... One strength of Surrogate Humanity is the range of technological discourses, objects, and processes in which the authors elucidate the logics of technoliberalism.” - J. Jesse Ramírez, American Quarterly

“Atanasoski andVora write with thoughtful scholarship and careful word selection.... [Surrogate Humanity] also provides a generative grounding in relevant science and technology studies and race theory literatures.... [I]t should be required reading in any sociology course on colonization and empire.” - Laurel Smith-Doerr, Contemporary Sociology

“Surrogate Humanity is a timely and worthwhile read.... There is a clear and rich theoretical analysis at play.”
  - Kevin Pabst, Security Journal

“Surrogate Humanity is a nuanced study, which will be of use to students and scholars interested in science and technology studies, neo/liberalism, critiques of Enlightenment, and technical modernities. The book provides a rigorous approach to mechanical warfare and important questions about the ethics and future of technological innovation.” - Chase Ledin, Fantastika Journal

“Surrogate Humanity questions what it means to be human at all, and is an incredibly useful analysis for anyone interested in shifting from thinking about robots within a tool-using paradigm, to an ethics paradigm.” - Lindsay Balfour, Cultural Studies