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.
Research notes, practical guidance, and essays on identity, information infrastructure, technology, and inclusion.
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Most clothes are made around a standard sizing chart. If your body doesn't match it, you are often made to feel that your body is the problem
Your Clothes Don't Fit takes a different approach. Our workshops help people use their own measurements to make clothes that fit them. We've run six pilot workshops so far, and response has encouraged us to keep going.
If you'd like to talk about my work, discuss a project, or ask me something, send me a message.
Or email me at: hello@katherinewyers.com