Dr Kathleen Richardson is a Senior Research Fellow in the Ethics of Robotics at the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility and part of the DREAM Project exploring robot enhanced technologies for children with autism. 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. After her PhD she was a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, a position she held at the University College London’s Department of Anthropology. Her postdoctoral work was an investigation into the therapeutic uses of robots for children with autism spectrum conditions. Kathleen’s first manuscript on robots is published by Routledge: An Anthropology of Robots and AI: Annihilation Anxiety and Machines (2015). In 2015 she launched the Campaign Against Sex Robots which challenges gender and cultural constructions of females and children as sex objects to be bought and sold as products. At De Montfort University she has initiated a research initiative called Freedom Ethics and Technology, which examines how ideas about freedom are constructed through sex, technology, free speech and narratives of free subjectivity. Her second manuscript explores the role of robots as attachment figures for children with autism and the way in which human attachment (or lack of) shapes consciousness. It is provisionally titled: An Anthropology of Attachment: Autism and Merging Consciousness of the Machine.
