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About

Ian Roderick is a critical media scholar whose work dissects the cultural and ideological narratives surrounding military and service robotics. His research centers on the fetishization of technology, the discursive construction of robot agency, and the power relations embedded in representations of automation. Roderick’s most influential contribution is his analysis of how the US military frames Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) robots as “life-saving devices,” a concept he develops in his 2010 article “Considering the fetish value of EOD robots” (17 citations). In “Mil-bot Fetishism: The Pataphysics of Military Robots” (16 citations), he further exposes how media representations endow military robots with exaggerated autonomy and agency, revealing a form of technological fetishism that obscures actual capabilities. His work extends to advertising, where he examines how robots are portrayed as “living labour” to reshape worker–employer power dynamics (2013, 4 citations), and to the ethical implications of robot therapy for autism, critiquing university promotional videos for misrepresenting autistic individuals (2023, 2 citations). Roderick’s scholarship is notable for its innovative use of multimodal critical discourse analysis to unpack the ideological work of robot imagery, making him a key voice in understanding how technology is culturally constructed.