DIJ researcher Celia Spoden will participate in this year’s annual conference of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) in Vancouver to present her latest research on cyber-physical spaces and avatar technologies. Celia’s presentation „Avatar Robots, Work, and Disability: Neoliberal Responsibilization or Questioning Ableist Notions of Labor?“ is part of the panel „From Fingerprint Identification to Avatar Robots: Past and Present of Technology in Japan’s Engineering of the Future“. With papers stretching from the Meiji to the Reiwa eras, the panel asks what is really new—or actually old—about latest technological milestones such as service robots and data economy. Celia’s paper explains how the employees of an avatar robot café in Tokyo, where individuals with disabilities and chronic illnesses work remotely by controlling robots to serve customers on-site, utilize the avatar robots as their extended embodiment and challenge notions of disability, productivity, and labor.