Giving people a voice

Welcome! Zoe Kahn joins the Compliant and Accountable Systems group at RC Trust as a postdoctoral researcher, working with Prof. Jat Singh. With her interdisciplinary background and strong commitment to public participation, she brings a perspective that connects cutting-edge research with societal needs.

Zoe Kahn received her PhD from the UC Berkeley School of Information and holds a B.A. in Sociology from New York University. Her research focuses on a central question of our time: how technologies that increasingly shape everyday life can be designed in ways that genuinely support the experiences, concerns, values, and rights of the people affected by them. Rather than treating technology as something abstract or purely technical, she approaches it as part of a broader social and legal context.

In her work, Zoe combines established qualitative and design methods - such as interviews and participant observation – with creative approaches like storytelling and sociotechnical visualizations. These methods help make complex technical systems understandable, opening up spaces for dialogue with people with varying levels of literacy, formal education, and familiarity with digital tech. During her PhD, she conducted in-depth qualitative research with people living in rural Togo to understand their perspective on the use of emerging technologies in humanitarian aid. She also engaged tech workers, homeless outreach professionals, and people living in South Africa and rural regions of Malawi, Rwanda, and the United States. Across these contexts, she explored issues such as responsible AI, explainability, data privacy, social cohesion, humanitarian technologies, and access to digital infrastructure. Collectively, her work advances new methodological approaches, generating empirical and conceptual insights into the design and governance of sociotechnical systems.

Her experience extends well beyond academia. Zoe has worked at an acquired tech startup and a civil rights law firm, and spent four summers at Microsoft. There, she contributed to the development of a responsible AI maturity model, tools for AI red teaming, guidance on inclusive research, and work related to Microsoft Copilot. These insights into industrial practice allow her to bridge the worlds of research, policy, and real-world technology development – an increasingly important task in times of rapid digital transformation.

At RC Trust, Zoe’s research aligns closely with the group’s human-centred and socio-technical approach. She is particularly interested in how different forms of expertise can be brought together: not only technical and legal knowledge, but also lived experience. By integrating these perspectives, her work aims to support the design of technologies that treat people with dignity, support diverse human values, are more transparent, accountable, and worthy of public trust.

With Zoe Kahn joining the team, RC Trust strengthens its interdisciplinary profile and its commitment to shaping digital technologies that serve society as a whole – grounded in research, informed by policy debates, and attentive to the voices of those most affected.