Sonia Yuhui Zhang is a Ph.D. candidate in Anthropology at The New School for Social Research. She researches the formulation of loneliness as a public health problem, and how social roboticists in Japan engage with this problematic. Her dissertation fieldwork is funded by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and the Japan Foundation, focusing on two key field sites: Ishiguro Laboratories in Osaka, known for its AI-powered humanoids, and Ory Laboratory in Tokyo, which creates remotely controlled robots called OriHime for people with disabilities.

Before her Ph.D. research, Sonia completed her MA in Anthropology at the New School for Social Research and her BA in Human Sciences at the University of Oxford. She also worked with an NGO in China, conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Gansu to investigate the effects of rural-urban duality on education.

At GIDEST, Sonia will work on her Ph.D. dissertation on loneliness and social robotics, with a particular focus on her interlocutors’ – social roboticists and robot users in Japan – depiction of human-robot relationship as freedom from oppressive sociality. From the 20th-century political philosophy of loneliness to recent formulations of "the loneliness epidemic,” loneliness is defined as the negative counterpart of connection. However, little is resolved about the quality of those connections and the diverse ways they break down. Japan’s intellectual and social history sheds light on the complexity of these questions, from ascetic ethics that renounce sociality to advocations for more-than-human relationships. Sonia’s interlocutors revive these perspectives by refusing to romanticise mutuality: by exposing loneliness as something one can feel when immersed in a functioning social network, longings for social robots signify how connections can also be illusory, misleading, violent and destructive. At a time when human connections are increasingly seen as a narrative of mental well-being and moral ideals, this project provides a critical engagement by delving into the technological spaces that question and reimagine normative definitions of the human.