Reverberations of a human:How the robot becomes an echo of the child

What occurs when children’s presence in schools becomes contingent on robots? This paper investigates how telepresence technologies, often introduced to address school non-attendance due to long-term or chronic illness, reshape perceived subjectivity and human-technology relations in educational contexts. Through posthuman perspectives, the paper presents novel, empirical research into the use of the technologies and what consequences such usage has on the social contexts of educational settings, shaping interactions in ways that blur the boundaries between human and machine. The technologies in question are employed to provide auditory, visual and somewhat physical material contact to a remote, educational setting for absent pupils and students. <br/>Through qualitative methodology and ethnographically gathered, empirical material, the paper will explore processes of technological mediation and multistability – while also extending upon these frameworks, to fully account for the persistence of human subjectivity within technological artifacts. Empirical cases illustrate how subjectivity not only lingers but reverberates within these devices, even postmortem, raising questions about the ontological status of such hybrid- or quasi-subjects. To conceptualise this phenomenon, I propose percolated subjectivity—a concept describing how technologies come to mediate and represent humans in ways that elicit human-to-human-like engagement.<br/>Through a diffractive reading of postphenomenology alongside new materialist and poststructuralist perspectives, this paper reconceptualizes subjectivity as something that can also be filtered, extended, and redistributed through technological apparatuses, including telepresence avatars.<br/>