Kat Zhou (she/her) is a DPhil candidate and Clarendon Scholar at the OII. Her research maps the labor struggles behind language models, specifically focusing on the crucial online and offline resistance undertaken by data workers around the world.
Before relocating to Oxford to commence her DPhil, Kat was designer in the tech industry and community organizer. Originally hailing from the US, she eventually moved to Sweden (where she proudly joined a union for the first time in her life!). She was also the creator of the Design Ethically project, which started out as a framework for applying ethics to the design process and eventually grew into a toolkit of speculative activities that help teams forecast the consequences of their products. Through her work with Design Ethically, she has spoken about the harms of deceptive and manipulative designs at events hosted by the Nobel Prize Summit (2023), European Parliament (2022) and the US Federal Trade Commission (2021), as well as an assortment of tech conferences. Kat has been quoted in the BBC, WIRED, Fast Company, Protocol, and Tech Policy Press.
Kat earned her Bachelor’s at Duke University and her Master’s at the University of Cambridge. Kat’s Master’s thesis, “Emotional Labor Offsetting: Unpacking the Racial Capitalist Fauxtomation behind Algorithmic Content Moderation,” investigated and problematized the corporate discourse emerging from algorithmic content moderation companies in the Global North that employ data labelers in the Global South, uncovering how racialized, digital, care workers are often hidden behind the technosolutionist hype generated by the firms at which they are precariously contracted.
Platform work, resistance, labour organizing, internet geographies, digital colonialism, artificial intelligence.
