Luna Dolezal

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About

Luna Dolezal’s research sits at the intersection of the body, technology, and care, exploring how emerging technologies reshape human experience and social relations. Her work focuses on three key areas: the phenomenology of touch and emotion in human-robot interaction, the sociology of healthcare robots, and the ethics of posthuman parenting. Dolezal’s major contributions include coining and theorizing “affective technotouch”—a concept that captures the multidimensional, emotionally charged encounters between humans and touch-based technologies. Her 2023 editorial on this topic (8 citations) has set a foundational framework for studying the ethical and political dimensions of technological touch. In healthcare robotics, she draws on ethnographic fieldwork in Finland to reveal how expectations and practices shift when robots like Välkky enter hospital wards, advocating for a sociology that foregrounds the mutual labor and complex definitions of care emerging in these settings. Her forward-looking work on “raised by robots” (2023) critically examines artificial wombs and childcare robots, questioning the risks and benefits of technological intervention in parenting. Dolezal’s research is notable for its interdisciplinary rigor, blending philosophy, sociology, and empirical observation to illuminate the lived realities of our increasingly robotic world.