Social robots: Things or agents?

This paper tackles our ordinary engagements with social robots to focus on their materiality. In considering how an educational robot is encountered as a part of everyday practices in social robotics, the focus is on the robot's materiality that is interactionally achieved. The attention to tactile exploration, spatial arrangements, and multimodal interactional aspects that characterize the encounter indicates how the robot is simultaneously enacted as a thing and as a social agent. The paper proposes that social agency of the robot is mutually constituted with its materiality and that to conceive of the robot's social character its thing-like aspects need to be taken into account.