Maria Ryabova

  • PhD Student - Cultural

I am a feminist scholar of science and technology with a focus on the intersections between technology, space, time and gender. My current research explores masculinities and future-making in AI and robotics. My dissertation, Robotics Masculinities: Gendered Technologies of Future-Making, examines how robotics engineers, government officials, startup innovation workers and feminist roboticists in the U.S. negotiate technological consent, the transformation of public space and competing visions of the future.

I am currently a Humanities Center and Asian Studies Center Graduate Fellow and Graduate Teaching Fellow in Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Before coming to Pitt, I founded and led a nonprofit organization in Russia for over nine years that provided basic, legal, and social support to the homeless, grounded in academic research, advocacy, and coalition building. I conducted sociological collaborative research on homelessness and migration, funded by the European Union and Higher School of Economics, Russia. I also worked in higher education in St. Petersburg, Russia and China, where I lived and worked for seven years. My next project is a comparative study of robotics in the US and China as geopolitical sites of competing national imaginaries of the future.

PUBLICATIONS

Gatz, Erin, Sarah Fox, Giselle Jhunjhnuwala, Maria Ryabova. “From Prototype to Practice: Reparative Politics and Feminist Infrastructure under Constraint.” Forthcoming, Feminist Studies. Ryabova, Maria. “Robots Killing Spotted Lanternflies: When Robotics and Biological Ecosystems Meet” Tree News. 2024. https://www.treenews.info/issue5

DEGREES AND EDUCATION

2008 - MA, Sociology, European University at St. Petersburg, St. Petersburg, Russia / University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

 2001 - BA, Social Work, Russian Social State University, Moscow, Russia

AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION

Critical Robotics and AI Studies, Feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS), Gender and Sexuality Studies, Masculinity Studies, Posthumanism, U.S. Studies, China Studies