Mick Wallis

Principles of robotics: regulating robots in the real world

ABSTRACT This paper proposes a set of five ethical principles, together with seven high-level messages, as a basis for responsible robotics. The Principles of Robotics were drafted in 2010 and published online in 2011. Since then the principles have influenced, and continue to influence, a number of initiatives in robot ethics but have not, to date, been formally published. This paper remedies that omission.

Bringing disability history alive in schools: promoting a new understanding of disability through performance methods

The transfer of disability history research to new generation audiences is crucial to allow lessons from the past to impact the future inclusion and equality agenda. As today’s children are the policy makers and the legislators of tomorrow, it is important for them to have opportunities to engage with disability life story narratives to understand personal experiences of disability and the social systems that influenced their construction through time and space. Through the embodiment and manipulation of these powerful narratives, children have the opportunity to challenge traditional perspectives of disability that may be disabling and oppressive. Such materials contribute to the making of an inclusive society by enabling children to craft mechanisms of intervention that can used to build resilience and resistance to barriers, and thereby generate social change. This paper examines how performance techniques can be used as a pedagogical tool to transpose new understandings of disability history and culture to school-based audiences. It builds on two previous projects: one focusing on life history narratives of three generations of disabled people, and the other exploring the potential for text-based disability narratives to move beyond text in interesting and creative ways. In so doing, this paper reports on a cross-disciplinary project which brought together academics (from performance and social science backgrounds), three performing arts secondary schools and disabled theatre performers. It presents qualitative evidence of how performance workshops delivered in three schools, by disabled performers, and stimulated by disability life history research, has the potential to increase disability awareness in the mainstream classroom and challenge negative disability stereotypes that influence how disabled people are made known in society.

Emergent objects: Designing through performance

Abstract This paper presents Emergent Objects 2, a portfolio of sub-projects funded by the EPSRC/AHRC ‘Designing for the Twenty-first Century’ (D4C21) initiative. Our focus is on the way interdisciplinary exchange and collaboration allows fluidity and responsiveness in uncertain design contexts. Resisting the Modernist, instrumental conception of design, Emergent Objects 2 does not propose an alternative model for direct emulation. Rather, the aim is to defamiliarise the design process; and to play with its nature and possibilities. The notion of a singular designer is displaced by the notion of a collaborative design process, whereby any participant is an active design agent, partaking in design functions. The paper explores how key performance concepts of play and embodied knowing are employed within our design practices, with illustrations from the three subprojects: Snake, SpiderCrab and Hoverflies.

Editorial: On Trauma

The idea of trauma has become so used in the public sphere as to become almost meaningless in its ubiquity. But this is also to say that we live in a historical moment in which society feels bound to its traumatic experiences. Trauma, it would seem, has become a cultural trope. Furthermore, contemporary trauma theory suggests a performative bent in traumatic suffering itself – the trauma-symptom is, after all, a rehearsal, re-presentation, re-performance of the trauma-event. This is not to trivialise traumatic suffering or detract from the insistence that trauma narratives must adequately, truthfully, be borne witness to so as not to diminish the weight of the original event. ‘On Trauma’ explores a range of instances in which performance becomes a productive frame through which to address traumata and/or where trauma theory illuminates performance. With papers examining topics from African funeral rituals to witnessing, and ethics to Argentinean escraches, this issue of Performance Research benefits from a cross-cultural dynamic which brings together academic articles on and artistic responses to performance that embodies, negotiates, negates or provokes trauma.

Editorial: On Value

This article examines entrenched debates around cultural value in neo-liberal contexts that have predominated over the last three decades; and moves on to examine how proposals for different forms of social and political structure suggest both alternative ecologies of value and a role for performance in designing them. We establish a broad frame for discussion of questions of value and culture by looking first at the current debate in the UK neo-liberal state, as exemplified by HM Treasury and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and then turn to what Baudrillard has to say about the State, general equivalence and modernitys adversarial union with Death. In traversing that range, we examine discussions of the evaluation of culture from a policy perspective alongside another set of discussions which address forms of resistance to global capitalism through ‘commonalism’ and social production. Finally, we take in both the pragmatics and the theoretical underpinnings of the left alternative scoped by Roberto Unger to see how ‘institutional contexts permanently open to their own revision’ might both support and depend on collaborative creative practices and sustain an alternative ecology of cultural value.

On Value and Necessity: The Green Book and its others

This article examines entrenched debates around cultural value in neo-liberal contexts that have predominated over the last three decades; and moves on to examine how proposals for different forms of social and political structure suggest both alternative ecologies of value and a role for performance in designing them. We establish a broad frame for discussion of questions of value and culture by looking first at the current debate in the UK neo-liberal state, as exemplified by HM Treasury and the Department of Culture, Media and Sport and then turn to what Baudrillard has to say about the State, general equivalence and modernitys adversarial union with Death. In traversing that range, we examine discussions of the evaluation of culture from a policy perspective alongside another set of discussions which address forms of resistance to global capitalism through ‘commonalism’ and social production. Finally, we take in both the pragmatics and the theoretical underpinnings of the left alternative scoped by Roberto Unger to see how ‘institutional contexts permanently open to their own revision’ might both support and depend on collaborative creative practices and sustain an alternative ecology of cultural value.