Marie Großmann M.A.

About me: I joined Project C05: “Mechanical Human Differentiation” of the Collaborative Research Center 1482 “Studies in Human differentiation” at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz as a research associate in February 2022.

The research interest of my PhD project lies in the observation of the representation, construction, and use of socio-humanoid robots in laboratories and the associated co-organized technical and social (further) development. The emergence of new technologies is not seen in isolation from social dimensions; rather, the development of technologies acts as a representation of social moments and reconfiguration of social processes. The forms of knowledge involved in the production of robots are therefore scrutinized in terms of how and in what ways socio-humanoid robots and humans differ from or resemble each other. My dissertation project focuses on technical components that are modeled on embodied knowledge, establishing the replication of human body corpuscles and apparent human skill as the technoscientific goal.

These implied forms of knowledge about human ability are supposed to enable such machine beings (Kalthoff/Link 2021: 321 ff.) to interact as smoothly as possible within a (human) environment. In empirical observations, the boundaries between the human and that which resembles it—in the form and ability of a social robot—are explored under sociological and human-theoretical assumptions.

The guiding question is how the human is represented in the capabilities of the robot through technical components. The analysis thus encompasses the (ontological) outside of human differentiation, using the example of humanoid robots, and addresses the work of differentiation as well as similarity between humans and non-humans.

Foto: Stephanie Füssenich