E: kathleen. Director of the Campaign Against Sex Robots. Her fieldwork was an investigation of the making of robots in labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kathleen's postdoctoral work was an investigation into the therapeutic uses of robots for children with autism spectrum conditions.
Kathleen has completed her second book Challenging Sociality. In she, along with her colleague launched the Campaign Against Sex Robots to draw attention to problematic effects on new technologies on human relations, and their potential impact to create new layers of inequalities between men and women and adults and children. She advocates a compassionate and violence free technology based on freedom ethics and is critical of coercive and violent models of human lived life that are transferred to the making of new technologies.
Richardson is developing a theory of robotics inspired by anti-slavery abolitionist feminism. My research is based on humanistic anthropology and is grounded in an ontological understanding of what it means to be human, and the primary importance of human relationship in our lives. I differentiate my anthropological practices from others in the field that decentre the human subject ANT, Meshworks, Cyborgs, Multispecies, Material-relations, free market liberalism who diminish the role of power in the structural organisation of cultures.
My research in autism and robots has enabled me to develop a detailed understanding of human sociality. My recent work on sex robots joins up empirical treatment of women in wider society as sex-objects bodies that can be bought, rented or traded in the sex trade with the development and production and imagination of sex robots.
I principally focus on the issue of power and how it is exercised over women and children. Moreover, my work is about showing how persons are still seen as property, things, and objects, and new debates that promote AI and robots as persons and the ongoing attack on human subjectivity. I maintain in my work a profound ontological difference between persons and things and reject they are equivalent and can be measured in relation to each other.
