Call for papers

TITLE: Special Issue on the Work to Make the Robots Work

GUEST EDITORS: Stuart Reeves, Hannah Pelikan

TIMELINE AND SUBMISSION DETAILS:

Deadline for abstracts (up to 300 words) on 1st Dec 2025

CALL TEXT:

There is significant interest in the promise of robots operating in varied circumstances that go far beyond traditional factory settings and 'Industry 4.0' scenarios. For example, we see deployments of robots (and attendant infrastructures that support them) in urban spaces (e.g., delivery robots, trash robots), museums (e.g., robot guides), shops and restaurants (e.g., robot servers), airports (e.g., autonomous cleaning systems), or as part of transport systems (e.g., autonomous shuttle services, robotaxis). A key signature of these physical robot deployments is that they are no longer just operating only around people who are professionally entailed with them, e.g., ‘primary users’ as envisioned by their designers. Instead, such robots are present alongside potentially large numbers of locally situated others – i.e., people going about their everyday activities there. Yet, from the perspective of the robot designer, such people tend to be treated as less relevant or consequential to robot operations. However, studies of social interaction demonstrate that such a separation between relevant and non-relevant is less clear cut in reality, and local cohorts may actually engage in considerable ‘invisible’ work to subtly enable robot operations (Pelikan et al. 2024). Further to this, while there have been significant advances in robots’ technical underpinnings—including the successful application of techniques of ever improving mechatronic aspects, and associated computational reasoning via advances in AI—such technical developments and their contribution to the success of robot initiatives nevertheless still rests upon considerable and variegated socially organised practices that are deployed widely to oversee, maintain, manage, or accommodate the presence of robots and their infrastructures in place. It is this practical work—whether done by their imagined ‘primary users’ or merely people who happen to be co-present—that remains of fundamental interest to studies of social interaction as such routine practices, like walking down a street or ordering food in a restaurant, become modified to fit with the new forms of social interactional practice that robots often lead to in their adoption. In other words, we cannot fully understand the impact of novel robotic technologies in situ without necessarily also seeking members’ understandings there too.

These new practices that absorb robots into local social and moral orders are of major concern to this Special Issue.  We are calling for submissions that present investigations into the social organisation of these vital social ‘infrastructures’—or as we might call them, the ‘work to make the robots work’—across domains and contexts as practically organised social phenomena. This may be located in / as the practical work of people on-scene, whether they are persons with some existing relation to such robots, or perhaps not (for example, ‘any’ pedestrian on a street or ‘any’ traveller passing through an airport). We are also interested submissions which address methodological and conceptual issues related to social interaction ‘with’ and around robots as it pertains to the organised work involved in making robots work. This includes, for example, respecifications of concepts of ‘human-robot interaction’, ‘human-robot collaboration’ etc., and the dimensions of their reliance upon ‘invisible’ human work to sustain assumptions about robots and their design.