I'm Katherine Wyers, a researcher and software engineer working on identity, information systems, and inclusion.
Institutions needs ways to identify people. They use names, numbers, categories, records, documents, and measurements. Without these things, many services simply wouldn't be able to operate.
But a digital record is not the same as a person.
My work looks at what happens when the information held about someone starts to shape how they are recognised and treated. I'm particularly interested in the moments when people change but their records don't, when different systems hold different versions of the same person, or when the available categories can't describe someone's life.
I research these problems, build software, and help organisations deal with them in practice.
Explore the research See what I'm building
Every organisation works with simplified versions of people.
A form asks for a fixed answer. A database stores it in a field. A category places someone into a group. An identifier connects one record to another.
These choices make administration possible, but they also set limits. They affect what an institution can see, what it can respond to, and what it treats as an error.
The problems often appear when something changes. A person changes their name, but the old name remains in another system. Two records that should refer to the same person can't be connected anymore. Information is corrected in one place and left unchanged elsewhere. A category intended to describe people becomes something they are expected to fit.
A lot of my work starts from these kinds of mismatches. I want to understand how they happen, what they mean for the people involved, and how we can build systems that deal more honestly with the complexity of human lives.
My research is about identity data, categorisation, and information infrastructure.
I study what happens after information about a person enters a system. How is it interpreted? Where does it travel to? What happens when it changes? Who's able to correct it? What happens when two systems don't agree?
My doctoral research examined how identity categories are negotiated and changed in public-sector information systems. It showed that decisions about fields, forms, categories, and data structures are not just technical. They can affect whether people are recognised correctly and whether they can take part in the institutions around them.
My PhD thesis is called Information Infrastructural Violence.
I write about identity, information infrastructure, and the things that happen when technical decisions shape people's lives. Some of the pieces here come from my research. Others come from what I found while building or working with systems. I also write about technology, memory, and the kinds of knowledge that the systems preserve or lose.
I'm interested in practical questions: What happens when identity information changes? Why can it be difficult to correct a record? What does a system assume about the person using it? Who has to live with the consequences when those assumptions are wrong?
This article explores how digital identity systems fail when personal data changes, highlighting legal rulings, infrastructural intertia, biometric limitations, and the resulting social exclusion and...
You have a social enterprise. Over the last few years you've seen it grow and develop and you've met the people whose lives you're...
I was recently chatting over lunch with a researcher. We were discussing AI, and whether large language models like ChatGPT produce anything new, or whether...
Most clothes are made around a standard sizing chart. If your body doesn't match that chart, you're often made to feel like your body is the problem. You're told that you're between size, you're the wrong shape, or you need to change to fit the measurements.
Your Clothes Don't Fit takes your body measurements as the starting point and makes the system fit the body. In our workshops, people learn how to measure their own bodies and use those measurements to make or alter clothes. We've run six pilot workshops so far and the response has been positive so we're going to build out the programme.
All of this work is connected to my research and my broader interests. Your Clothes Don't Fit asks what changes when we stop treating the person as 'wrong' and instead look at the ways we can make systems that adapt around the person.
If something here connects with a problem you're working on, your very welcome to contact me.
I'm particularly interested in conversations about identity data, information systems, interoperability, data governance, and research. You can also contact me about Wyerworks, Grassroots Lab, speaking engagements or software projects.
Tell me what you're working on and where you're stuck
You can contact me through the form below, or email me at: hello@katherinewyers.com