It's not (just) about the robots

an update and a dissertation snippet

It’s been so long since I last wrote that I’ve had trouble knowing how to greet you again. Then wisdom came from a book of my daughter’s.

“Love is in the simple words: good morning and hello!”

So, good morning and hello! In the last months I sent in my dissertation to the committee, who I’ll hear back from in a few weeks. I also started something called, Sacred Sessions, in Delft’s beautiful Oude Kerk. The 75 minute gatherings blend philosophy, art, contemplative practice, and collective reflection. And they’re my little revolt against a culture of predictability and efficiency.

Last session we listened to a cellist improvise and spoke to our hearts (literally!). Two weeks before that we sat in a curved line and watched the sunlight move through the windows for fifteen minutes. Radical, right? I’ll share more on the sessions soon, but for now you can read this or sign up here.

I want to share a little bit about my dissertation, which is supposed to be about robots and food but is really about care and connection. Truth be told, the whole thing became rather unhinged. Don’t fret— I met the requirements for a doctoral degree. There are sufficient number of published journal articles and book chapters. There’s an introduction and a conclusion that follow academic norms. Well, close enough anyways. But, there are also (brace yourself):

Poetry. Drawings. Meanderings!

Stories. Metaphors. A confession!

Photos. A post-it. Chatty footnotes!

I came in with good intentions. Truly, I did. The year was 2019 and I was determined to show the engineers on my project that philosophy was USEFUL. I was going to wrangle the concept of care into a tidy package to be applied. And I planned to do it through intellectual prowess.

“Applied”. I repeated the word to anyone who would listen in hopes of convincing them and myself that I would be doing something with philosophy. And where did I plan to apply theories of care, exactly? To the design of robots in grocery stores and distribution centers, of course.

“Care?” many asked early on. “What about another value? Something more timely, like, privacy?” one suggested.

I should have known that things were going to get messy. For a while I managed to keep my ideas organized into sections with headings and arguments with logical conclusions. Then two years later divine timing saw that I hit the middle of my PhD at the same time that I had my first child. Either one of these life events alone will thrust a person into existential reflection. Together, my world shifted irreparably.

Paradoxically, the exhausted blur of new motherhood granted me clarity. In the year after my daughter was born, I was confronted with how I used solutionism to the detriment of complexity. I couldn’t ignore how the words in my papers directly opposed my personal shopping and eating ethics. I caught myself scrubbing ideas clean in preparation for publication.

It became too hard to keep my creative yearnings, spiritual intuitions, and intellectual ambitions apart. Everything came crashing in. My dissertation is the rubble. In the heap there’s myriad academic perspectives and themes, ranging from phenomenology, feminist theory and epistemology, philosophy of technology and design, value theory, care ethics, decolonial methodology, food and agriculture politics, and theories of attention. Readers will stumble across personal essays, unanswered questions, and quips from my parents.

You may think that in drawing on so many fields and styles I have compromised depth. And perhaps you’re right. Instead of a deep dive on a single topic, I offer a tapestry that simultaneously focuses on robots, automation in workplaces and retail, and politics of food technology, while also examining and experimenting with the practice of philosophy and ethics itself.

Why did I include all of it? Have I some trouble editing? The honest truth is that I believe philosophy is about honesty and truth. If I only wrote about robots in grocery stores and withheld my struggle to get food on the table for my family, readers would get just half the story. To me, the personal and the intellectual are always combined.

So my dissertation includes all of my considered thought on retail robots and the world in which such machines can emerge. I held nothing back.

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In the coming months I’ll share some more poems and essays from the dissertation. If you think this approach to research is interesting, I bet you’d like Pause and Effect, a cool organization that’s reimagining research practices.

Soon I’ll send out videos that I’m calling stirrings, in which I’ll share ideas from the Sacred Sessions. But if you want the full tingly feeling of the sessions, you’ll have to come to Delft! You can keep up to date on events I’m hosting or speaking at here.

Thank you, thank you for being here. I’m happy to be back.