This chapter addresses some of the scientific, philosophical and theological arguments brought to bear on the debates surrounding human–robot relationships. Noting that we define robots through our relationships with them, it shows how factors such as emotion and agency can indicate things such as a theory of mind that condition users to expect reciprocal relationships that model a sense of partnership. These factors are important in ‘lovotics’, or a trend in social robotics to produce robots that people want to develop relationships with. Such relationships, however, at least given current capabilities in robotics, will always fall short of conditioned expectations because robots, rather than being full partners, are largely reducible to the self or user. The chapter introduces the notions of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism to demonstrate these critiques, and then moves on to consider alternative figurations of relationships – drawing in particular on articulations of relationality – that may enable us to rethink how we image and imagine robots.

This chapter reviews progress in the field of artificial intelligence, and considers the special case of the android: a human-like robot that people would accept as similar to humans in how they perform and behave in society. An android as considered here does not have the purpose to deceive humans into believing that the android is a human. Instead, the android self-identifies as a non-human with its own integrity as a person. To make progress on android intelligence, artificial intelligence research needs to develop computer models of how people engage in relationships, how people explain their experience in terms of stories and how people reason about the things in life that are most significant and meaningful to them. A functional capacity for religious reasoning is important because the intelligent android needs to understand its role and its relationships with other persons. Religious reasoning is taken here not to mean matters of specific confessional faith and belief according to established doctrines but about the cognitive processes involved in negotiating significant values and relationships with tangible and intangible others.

This chapter serves as one of two epilogues to this volume. In it, María Elena García focuses on three main themes: (1) the authors’ encounter with Indigenous Studies; (2) the importance of engaging with Native ideas of affect; and (3) the significance of thinking with haunting and ghosts as central to reimagining the history of science in the Americas. García explores the possibilities and limitations of placing Indigenous Studies next to decolonial scholarship and reflects on how or if this approach offers transformative frameworks for writing about and practising the “human sciences.” She also offers some thoughts about the place and significance of the more-than-human in this book, with a particular focus on ghosts, spirits, bones, and other entities that haunt the history of the human sciences. Finally, García takes inspiration from theorists engaging in multisensorial analysis to consider the “structures of feeling” that were both part of the extractive and colonial mode of the human sciences, and that might also emerge once we center Indigenous Studies values like radical relationality, reciprocity, and accountability in our writing, teaching, and mentorship.

The introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s focus as a whole and explores its relation to existing historiography, including its engagement with decolonial and postcolonial theory and scholarship in Indigenous Studies and Latin American Studies. In highlighting the book’s unique arguments, contributions, and perspectives, the Introduction explains the concept and double meaning of "troubling encounters" and provides the book’s thematic organization. Noting that some chapters adopt a local perspective, others a national one, and yet others draw attention to transnational and even global domains, the Introduction reflects upon the variety of scales for interpreting and troubling the history of encounters in the human sciences. For the authors, the legacies of those scales are read in the myriad interactions of expedition science, in the relationality implied in fieldwork or the logic of settler colonial custodial institutions, and finally in the resulting theories about human nature and behavior that circulated globally within scientific circles and beyond.

This chapter explores two different systems of research oversight in recent Brazilian history: the bureaucracies of the twentieth and twenty-first-century Brazilian state, and approaches developed by A’uwẽ (Xavante) aldeias over the same period in Pimentel Barbosa Indigenous Land. Focusing primarily on genetics-based research, Dent develops the concept of bureaucratic vulnerability. She argues that the way some geneticists have interpreted state regulatory systems regarding biosamples creates additional risks for Indigenous people under study. At the same time, Indigenous groups are placed in a bureaucratic double bind, where non-Indigenous experts are called on to justify and validate their claims in the eyes of the state. The protectionist state regulation contrasts with relationship-based practices that A’uwẽ interlocutors have developed over repeated interaction and years of collaboration with a group of anthropologists and public health researchers. Specifically, A’uwẽ have responded to the dual and interrelated challenges of recognition under a colonial state and the management of outside researchers through the careful modulation of researchers’ affective experience of fieldwork, working to create enduring relationships and mutual obligation.

This chapter seeks to trouble the understanding of how the category of the “human” is articulated in the theory and literature concerning race. It asks how one might view the category of the “human” differently when the focus is shifted from Blackness to Indigeneity. Departing from the premise that Black studies recurringly examines the question of which bodies are assigned a fully human status in a white-dominated society, the chapter posits that Indigenous studies and literatures interrogating the category of the “human” oftentimes ask a question that moves beyond dehumanization: namely, how the human is constructed or constituted in relation to other forms of life, other-than-human or more-than-human, including the land itself. Beyond literary articulation and theoretical interest, this question also has political import as it works to shift the parameters of what is thinkable as politics under the auspices of settler colonialism, as this chapter shows through the analysis of present-day Indigenous poetry by Deborah Miranda (Esselen/Chumash) and Natalie Diaz (Mojave).

Taking Kerry Reed-Gilbert’s anthology The Strength of Us as Women: Black Women Speak (2000) as touchstone, the chapter undertakes a conversation between two Aboriginal women poets from Narungga and Wiradjuri standpoints about the transformative power of Indigenous poetry and its significant contribution to literature in the world. Offering an alternative to the essay, the authors discuss embodied engagements with the colonial archive and the theme of relationality that informs so much of Aboriginal writing. The chapter considers the potential of poetry to be both an affective tool and literary intervention. It outlines the methods of Gathering and Archival-Poetic praxis as ways to explore the counter-narrative potential of poetry. In considering the role of memory work and memory-making, the authors also discuss blood memory and body memory.

This chapter presents an understanding of compositional practice based fundamentally on sound and space, and looks at a range of case studies that explore the harmonic, timbral, and material consequences of this approach. The chapter concludes by arguing that the variety of approaches discussed succeed because the concern with sound permeates every stage of compositional thinking and does not just manifest in specific compositional techniques.

Chapter 6 expands on African legal cosmologies by demonstrating what it is that the world has missed out on by not incorporating customary law, ethics, and Indigenous norms from the Global South much earlier into the jurisprudence on sustainable development. The different senses of the legal dimensions of the concept of sustainable development as embedded in non-positivist legal traditions and thinking about law differently have tremendous potential to ensure that the sustainable development becomes effectively local, a concern that must engage the attention of international law scholars. This is where eco-legal philosophies and ecological integrity interact to found ecological law which involves reorganising the law–ecology nexus by retrenching the overbearing dominance of Eurocentric law on the planetary community and its disproportionate dominance in the humanity–nature nexus. In this respect, the renewed normativity of sustainable development as ecological integrity recalibrates law as a subset of a universal whole where law is appropriately located within, and not external to, nature. This remedial task is made possible by forging a beneficial interconnection between customary law, ethics, and Indigenous norms guided by the awareness that sustainable development reflects legal pluriversality and a significant feature of alternative legal ontologies.

Relationality captures how people want others to relate to them, and how they will relate to diverse others, yet as this chapter shows “relating to others” may include many different elements and be person- and/or context-specific. This chapter uses interviews with nonprofit practitioners and researchers, and also national surveys of policymakers and AmeriCorps program leaders, to lay out some of the ways in which different kinds of people who seek change in civic life express uncertainty about relationality.

This paper revisits the concept of reasonabilism, which subsumes a form of reconfiguration of an holistic conception of consciousness in a manner that ties contingent rational expressions or the principle of consistency to corresponding enabling sets of affectivities and conatus (degrees of beneficence or their negation as contained in volitional states) and vice versa, such that they become two sides of the same coin. The paper explores the basis of reasonability and reasonabilism in African thought, showing that African thought is not as long on the formal radial scale as it is deep on the substantive relational scale, including the relationalities and sociality of pure consciousness (self-reflecting intensionality, its representations and levels of reality) and the implications of these for the scale and depth of conceptions of justice, especially intergenerational justice as it relates to the environment and development generally. Contemporary Africa faces the challenge of retaining and deepening the conatal depth of beneficence in its Indigenous philosophical resources and heritage while expanding its radial of consistency to meet the global challenges of looming environmental disaster and the question of environmental sustainability, poverty, disease, etc. This paper also tries to point towards the necessary reconceptualization and reinvigorations that would further enrich African thought along the required lines.

This chapter provides an overview of the theory of relationality – the idea that people care about how others relate to them, and whether they can successfully relate to others – and how potential collaborators can be uncertain about these relational aspects. “Relating to others” captures both the information to be shared, and also the experience of interacting. Key to the theory of relationality, as it applies to potential collaborators with diverse forms of expertise, is that status-based stereotypes can drive a wedge between having expertise and having that expertise be socially recognized. This chapter builds up to a series of hypotheses about how potential collaborators care about the information to be shared and the experience of interacting when choosing whether to engage in new collaborative relationships with diverse thinkers. It also identifies several possible interventions for fostering valuable new collaborative relationships.

While Percy Shelley anticipates and speaks to many important subjects of “our times,” he also developed a poetry and methodology for connecting and collaborating with peoples in other places and epochs. In this account, the editors reconsider Shelley’s often binaristic historical reception as both politically radical and childishly idealist, instead offering a version of the poet who continuously rethinks categories and relations among people and their times.

This chapter is organized according to two complementary sections. The first examines ethical practice as an extension of liberal humanism, a series of operating assumptions that present select claims of discrete subjects and individualized responsibility. Liberal humanism colludes with capitalistic claims of value and a foregrounding of articulated rights over and above any semblance of collective justice. From this frame extend a series of research practices that “make sense” in particular ways and according to procedurized claims of ethical practice. Part two engages with an alternative ethical practice that is termed “relational materialism.” Relational materialism refuses the governing processes endemic to liberal humanism in favor of an affirmative ethical practice animated by transformative potential – the resistive assumption that we might become otherwise through generating a future yet unknown. Rather than solely describing or reconstituting the normative status quo (as is seen in conventional research), relationally materialist inquiry begins with an ethic of refusal such that we might experiment with alternative ways of living that are not governed by the ubiquitous claims of liberal humanism.