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The paper aims to reflect on the function(s) served by the network of Argentine universities for environmental management and social inclusion (UAGAIS), including sharing information, empowering its members and fostering political action. To these functions, the authors add that networks play a prominent role in promoting culturally and locally meaningful representations of sustainability, and as rhetorical devices for positioning universities within the national, regional and international context.

Drawing upon a constructionist and cultural approach, two analyses were conducted: the first an analysis of the institutional webpages of selected UAGAIS universities; the second, a discursive analysis of five in-depth interviews conducted with UAGAIS representatives. Both analyses looked at local and cultural specificities of sustainability in higher education, perceptions of the sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the role of UAGAIS for individuals, universities and other social actors involved.

Results show how sustainability is used in institutional communication and in the interviews to frame the role of the university in the community. The network serves information and empowering functions, as the same time acting as an amplifier of the activities performed under the “Extensión” framework. Such a culturally situated approach to sustainability is used to engage different social actors and to stress commitment of universities with the environmental and social needs of local communities.

The results underline the role played by networks in transformative process. Anchored to the culturally rooted “Extensión” concept, the examined network serves as a place to advance the social commitment and the local understanding of sustainability. Moreover, it is rhetorically used to challenge the status quo and advocate for systemic change.

On the verge of what has been hailed as the next technological revolution, the purpose of this paper is to examine scientific and popular definitions of the social robot, reflecting on how expert and lay spheres of knowledge interact. Drawing on social representations theory, this paper aims to elucidate how social robots are named and classified, and to examine the dynamics contributing to their definition.

Scientific and popular definitions of the social robot were investigated by conducting: a systematic review of relevant articles published from 2009 to 2015 in the International Journal of Social Robotics; an analysis of the definitions retrievable from the scientific literature using Google Scholar; and an assessment of the interest in the public sphere, and of the popular definitions retrievable online (by inputting “social robot” in Google Trends, and in Google).

Scientific definitions of the social robot adopt two strategies, one drawing on and merging previous definitions, the other proposing new, visionary, forward-looking definitions. Popular online definitions of social robots attribute new emotional, linguistic and social capabilities to their physical body.

The findings need to be confirmed by further research, given the limited size of the data sets considered, and the distortions in the data due to filters and the opacity of the online tools employed.

Both scientific and non-scientific definitions see social robots as being capable of interacting with and working for humans, but attribute them a different degree of (functional or full) autonomy. In future, any controversy over the connotation of social robots is likely to concern their sociality and autonomy rather than their functionality.