Mary Douglas Research Scholarships Awarded

Vittoria Roatti

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I graduated with a Bachelor degree in Biological Sciences from the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia (Italy) in 2013. Later I moved to Turin where I obtained a Master in Environmental Biology in 2017. My Master thesis focused on the breeding biology of a seabird species, the Scopoli’s Shearwater, whose largest European colony is hosted on Linosa Island, in the Sicily Channel. I’ve collaborated to collect data on Linosa since 2016 with a project led by the scientific association Ornis italica.

Shortly after graduation I spent two months in Liwonde National Park (Malawi) working for African Parks in the management sector. My main duties were monitoring, through tracking and direct observations, wild cheetahs who had been recently reintroduced in the park and habituating them to human presence. Most recently I took part in data collection with the Tsaobis Baboon Project, a long-term behavioural study on a desert-adapted population of chacma baboons in Namibia. I collected behavioural data for over three months, with a particular focus on mother-infant conflict and its influence on weaning.

What is your research on?

My research project aims to understand the factors that enhance and constrain horizontal and vertical transmission of social information in baboons, thereby promoting or limiting cultural evolution. The study will use a highly social primate, the chacma baboon (Papio ursinus), as a study species and data collection will focus on three baboon troops of the Tsaobis Baboon Project, who inhabit Tsaobis Nature Park (Namibia).

I will study horizontal information transmission – information that passes from peer to peer – through tool-use experiments. These experiments will allow me to understand what baboons learn from others and why learning to use tools is so difficult for baboons. I will also investigate vertical information transmission– from older to younger individuals – through a longitudinal study on infants and juveniles. From these data I aim to understand from whom infants and juveniles learn, how social learning changes during development, and how it is influenced by maternal style and the social environment.

What aspect of the research are you most excited about?

I am particularly excited to perform tool-use experiments in the wild because little is known about social learning of complex tasks in baboons. At the same time, I am thrilled to study infants’ and juveniles’ behaviour because they are funny and unpredictable, always doing something interesting.

What do you believe the contribution of your research will be?

I believe that this research will provide an important contribution to understanding of the evolution of culture in non-human primates and the origin of human’s uniquely cumulative culture.

Raffaele Buono

Can you tell us a bit about yourself?

I read Sociology & Media Studies at Goldsmiths College, graduating in 2018. Here I grew increasingly interested in Japanese digital culture, culminating in a dissertation on virtual popstars in Japan. In order to pursue my interest in both digitality and cultural specificity, I decided to continue my studies moving to anthropology, leading me to the MSc in Digital Anthropology here at UCL. I had the chance to meet academics and colleagues who shaped my understanding of the digital, shifting my interest towards the ways in which technological artefacts materially embody, mobilise and often contest framings of the world which are historically and spatially contingent.

Such an interest led me into writing my postgraduate thesis as an ethno-historical exploration of the ways in which the emergence of different ontological regimes in different parts of the world had been accompanied by scientific and technological tools which simultaneously construct and are constructed by the worlds which are envisioned and perceived by different cultures.

What is your research on?

My research is mainly focused on the fast-growing field of social robotics, focusing my attention on the socio-cultural landscape of Japan. Particularly central within my research is the idea of how a technical object such as the robot is rendered ‘social’. I am interested in analysing how sociality is materially embedded within specific artefacts through engineering and scientific practices which aim precisely at establishing a form of relationality and balance between two competing rationales: social robots become, and keep on becoming, social by mediating between their culturally-inflexed and culturally-inflexing external function, and their technical internal functioning. I am thus interested in working alongside engineers and scientists in Japanese research centres in order to investigate how these two modes of existence of the robotic object are brought forward through specific practices and techniques which bring to light the ontogenetic nature of technical objects – that is, their generative and processual character which tends towards constant adaptation both in regards to its internal structures (i.e. functioning), and to the external forces with which they interact (i.e. function).

From my analysis of what exactly is social about social robotics, I aim at highlighting how progress and innovation are not purely a matter of scientific discovery and technical mastery over an inert matter, but that rather such progress emerges in the first place out of transformative struggles between the internal life of an object and its surroundings, be it at the micro level of construction of robots, or at the macro level of material substance and the cosmos.

What aspect of the research are you most excited about?

Thanks to the support of the Mary Douglas Award, I will have the chance to conduct fieldwork in Japan. Japan has been an often overlooked site of ethnographic analysis, and I am excited to focus my attention precisely on such a peculiar site, where Western modernity, technological fascination and non-modern sensibility coexist together in often conflicted ways.

More importantly, this project will give me the chance to be part of a thriving community working to understand how exactly robotics will change us, and what societies we can envision moving forward. In this sense, I stand in a privileged position, analysing this robotic revolution as it happens: I will be in Japan during Tokyo Olympics 2020, the first sport event where robots will be an integral part of the celebration and day-to-day crowd management and entertainment. It will be an honour for me to be among the first academics to look at these new revolutionary social arrangements.

What do you believe the contribution of your research will be?

I hope my research will highlight how it is necessary to rethink the ways in which social scientists approach questions concerning technology. By moving beyond an anthropocentric understanding of technical objects, and towards an interest in investigating how robots mobilise localised and indigenous understandings of sociality, culture, and materiality, I will attempt at reconsidering objects in terms of their agential capacities, and their ability to reticulate the world through their specific affordances.

Furthermore, by moving within the uncharted territory of robotics, I hope my research will contribute to the development of new research tools. I believe the emergence of specific methodologies and a tailored modus operandi will be a chance to reaffirm the validity of anthropological analysis even within commercial research. Robotics is increasingly part of our lives, and soon there will be a need of researchers able to help companies understand how their robotic products function and are perceived within human communities: this project aims at building the first blocks to make such research viable in the future.