Porn Robots - what's the problem?

https://kathleenrichardson.org/

Kathleen completed her PhD at the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge. Her fieldwork was an investigation of the making of robots in labs at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). After her PhD she was fortunate to become a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (BAPDF), a position Kathleen held at University College London. Her postdoctoral work was an investigation into the therapeutic uses of robots for children with autism spectrum conditions. In 2013, Kathleen was part of the Digital Bridges Project, an innovative AHRC funded technology and arts collaboration between Watford Palace Theatre and the University of Cambridge.

She am author of An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines (2015) and Challenging Sociality? An Anthropology of Autism, Attachment and Robots (2018). Kathleen has another book in the pipeline on sex robots.

In 2015 she launched the Campaign Against Porn Robots to draw attention to problematic effects of new technologies on human relations, and their potential impact to create new layers of inequalities between men and women and adults and children. Kathleen is developing a theory of robotics inspired by anti-slavery abolitionist and second-wave feminism.

Kathleen Richardson

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