About
Kat Zhou (she/her) is a DPhil candidate and Clarendon Scholar at the OII. Her research examines the sociology of work and geographies of artificial intelligence.
Before relocating to Oxford to commence her DPhil, Kat was a designer in the tech industry, working in the US and Sweden. 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.
Research Interests
Platform work, resistance, labour organizing, internet geographies, digital colonialism, artificial intelligence.