Co-Scribing Machines

This article complicates the process of creating humanoid robots by drawing attention to more-than-human entanglements. Based on three months of ethnographic fieldwork in German robotics laboratories, I develop a material feminist perspective on robot construction as “co-scription”: a challenging collaboration between nonhuman materials and human engineers. By attending to moments of experimental breakdowns, physical strain, and deep emotional investment among roboticists, the article highlights the challenges of robotics practices. However, rather than viewing these challenges as failures, I reframe them as generative sites for rethinking robotics’ promises of innovation. I argue that ubiquitous challenges in robotics and the evident limitations of robotics as inherent to collaborations between engineers and robot materials, in which materials do not act as reliable resources but as contingent tricksters. The article shows in detail how technological innovations are deeply affected by the materials used. Finally, I offer a situated, materially sensitive methodological approach that not only contributes to feminist science and technology studies but also speaks directly to robotics practice.