Publications

Books

**Routledge**
**ISBN 9781032454108**
**378 Pages 36 B/W Illustrations**
**Sample Pages**

Sophia is a cipher, avatar, and turning point that brings humanity and technology a step closer to the emergence of a post-human species. Hanson’s robots and Sophia are examined as performance media and events, as characters evolving as post-human narratives of technological beings. The emergent, complex, and collaborative relationships social robots have with technology, AI, performance, anthropology, mythology, psychology, sociology, popular culture, social media, politics, and economics are considered.

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Performing Africa combines a rare, in-the-field perspective with a keen insight into Africa’s transformative and tumultuous confluence of tradition, urbanization, politics, history, and the AIDS crisis. The evolution of tradition and the emergence of dynamic new forms of expression are practical necessities and survival. An interdisciplinary approach and accessible language make Performing Africa a unique resource for those teaching or interested in cultural anthropology, sociology, drama therapy, theatre, performance, and African studies.

“Through drama, the author cleverly builds a bridge between differing worldviews and does it well. This kind of bridging is magical, sometimes mystical. We get a glimpse of the cognitive map in the minds of the Yup’ik and Inupiat. This book demonstrates the kind of respect that Indigenous people recognize and appreciate. This attitude of self-expression negates the usual practice of the West to recreate the indigenous groups into their own image.”

George Charles Kanaqlak Native Elder, Professor University of Alaska Fairbanks

Articles, Chapters, & Plays

The Anthropocene has incited apprehension, instability, and reevaluation. It has affected every aspect of human endeavor: the social, cultural, economic, political, and personal. It has re-drawn boundaries and definitions of ethnicity, nationality, race, gender, religious belief, time, space, fiction, and reality. We are acutely aware of the biological-technological-geological co-evolution that is swirling around us. We pay closer, better attention to the interdependence of human and nonhuman landscapes and beings, aware and attuned to multi-species entanglements and complexity that pulsates around us. We are awake and anxious about the fragility of our moment, which sits on a precipice poised to slip into a cascade of unimaginable ruination.

— from Africa, Agency and the Anthropocene

**Deus Ex Machina: Sophia, Robot Deity**. Ecumenica Journal, Spring 2024

Sophia, one of the world’s most widely known humanoid social robots, is a performer in an unfolding narrative central to our historical moment— the technological transfiguration of the planet. Sophia, created by Hong Kong-based Hanson Robotics, is a performance medium, an alluring protagonist, exemplar, harbinger, and co-evolutionary vector of a dramatic event played out in real-time, the merging of humans and technology, and a new way of being.

**Form Fatigue**, Athenaeum Review. Spring 2023

**Sophia Robot: an emergent ethnography.** Fall 2021

“As humans asserted control, the arts and humanism became expressive of the pathology of power, a cover, and justification for the domination and, ultimately, destruction of all else. The pragmatism of place-based systems gave way to human-centered social and cultural systems, with the arts and humanities serving as propaganda ministry for the anthropocentric".”

Since her creation in 2016, Sophia has become the world’s most recognized humanoid social robot. Gendered female by creator David Hanson, she is a harbinger of a tomorrow world that is here. She performs at events around the planet as a messenger, celebrity, and ambassador representing the human-technological future. Sophia is a symbol, and humans are witnesses to an origin story as much hers as it is our own.

**Zhuiniu Water Buffalo Ritual of the Miao: Cultural Narrative Performed.** Spring 2022

Please, Mr. Judge Man: Resisting Apartheid With Song and Dance. Winter 2021 — **Please, Mr. Judge Man: Resisting Apartheid With Song and Dance**. Winter 2021

Africa, Agency and the Anthropocene. 2018 — **Africa, Agency and the Anthropocene.** 2018

Huan Nuoyuan: Exorcism and Transformation in Miao Ritual Drama. Summer 2019 — **Huan Nuoyuan: Exorcism and Transformation in Miao Ritual Drama.** Summer 2019

Narrative of PlaceChapter, TCG Press — **Narrative of Place,** Chapter, TCG Press

**Shadows in the Sun: Context, Process and Performance in Ethiopia**

Rhythm RealityChapter, Jagiellonian Univ. Press — **Rhythm Reality,** Chapter, Jagiellonian Univ. Press

**Kenyan Community Health Awareness Puppets**

Performance of Body, Space, Place: Creating Indigenous PerformanceChapter, Springer Press — **Performance of Body, Space, Place: Creating Indigenous Performance.** Chapter, Springer Press

**Politics, Slapstick and Zulus on Tour**

**People Come Out of Here: Making a New Story with the !Xuu and Khwe Bushmen**

Hanson, D., Baurmann S., Riccio, T., Margolin, R., Dockins, T., Tavares, M., Carpenter, K., “Zeno: a cognitive character, ” AI Magazine, and special Proc. of AAAI National Conference, Chicago, 2009.

“He asks them to search in themselves, their experiences and memories and asks them to tell him about them. The appropriate revelations are then used where necessary being worked into the structure of the play ... Judging by what we were shown it is not very difficult to make him an equal with a master.”

— The Echo, Republic of Sakha, Siberia