AUTHOR=Muhle Florian 

TITLE=Robots as addressable non-persons: an analysis of categorial work at the boundaries of the social world

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Sociology

VOLUME=Volume 9 - 2024

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/sociology/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2024.1260823

DOI=10.3389/fsoc.2024.1260823

ISSN=2297-7775

ABSTRACT=Prompted by the material turn in the social sciences and the development of novel interaction technologies, lively debates have been established in social theory in recent years, arguing about the agency of non-human entities. While these debates primarily exchange theoretical arguments against the background of different social theoretical positions, ethnomethodological Membership Categorization Analysis allows for an empirical approach to questions of non-human agency. The article demonstrates this by first discussing the debate on non-human agency, then showing how Membership Categorization Analysis can be used to investigate categorial work at the boundaries of the social, and finally using the example of an encounter between two museum visitors and a humanoid robot to show how the robot is categorized in a specific way as an 'addressable nonperson'. In this way, it becomes clear how social-theoretical debates and empirically oriented Membership Categorization Analysis can mutually inspire each other and how the 'basic categorization apparatus' deals with new alterities.