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=9 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 in social theory have arisen regarding the agency of non-human entities. While these debates primarily involve exchanging theoretical arguments against the background of different theoretical positions, ethnomethodological membership categorization analysis (MCA) provides an empirical approach to questions of non-human agency. The article discusses the debate on non-human agency, demonstrates how MCA can be used to investigate categorial work at the boundaries of the social, and presents 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 non-person.’ In this way, it becomes clear that social-theoretical debates and empirically oriented MCA can mutually inspire each other and how the ‘basic categorization apparatus’ addresses new alterities.