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About

Ericka Johnson is a leading voice at the intersection of feminist theory, robotics, and healthcare technology. Her research critically examines how emerging technologies—particularly social robots and emotion recognition systems—are designed, deployed, and experienced in care settings. Johnson’s most influential work, “Feminist Human-Robot Interaction” (2023, 103 citations), lays out a visionary framework for embedding feminist ethics into HRI practice, challenging the field to move beyond technocentric assumptions. She has also investigated the unintended consequences of welfare technology in long-term care facilities, coining the concept of “technostress” among healthcare workers navigating new robotic and virtual reality tools. Her work on “affective corners” (2023) uses the metaphor of hard-to-reach spaces to critique the design of companion robots like Pepper, while her analysis of emotion measurement (2022) interrogates the ethical implications of assigning numerical values to human feelings. Johnson’s contributions are vital for anyone designing or studying technologies intended for vulnerable populations, offering a critical lens that prioritizes equity, care, and human dignity over efficiency.