Kathleen Richardson is a Professor of Ethics, Culture of Robots and AI at De Montfort University. She is based in Leicester, England. Richardson is the Co-Founder of The Campaign Against Sex Robots, which raises concerns about the ethical implications of sex robots. In addition, she is interested on how robots can be therapeutic to people with autism.

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

In 2015, Richardson along with her colleague launched the Campaign Against Sex Robots, which attempts to bring awareness to the potential 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.

She advocates as an alternative compassion 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.

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Richardson is developing a theory of robotics inspired by anti-slavery abolitionist feminism.