Ericka Johnson

Ericka Johnson is a Professor and Deputy Prefect at Linköping University, working within Gender Studies in the Department of Thematic Studies. She is affiliated with the Center for Medical Humanities and Bioethics (CMBS), Bodies Hub, and the P6: Body, Knowledge, Subjectivity research collective. Her work bridges Science & Technology Studies, medical humanities, and gender studies, with a focus on how data representation intersects with AI systems and how technologies 'refract' invisible discourses to make them visible.

Johnson's research program investigates how the world becomes data, exploring connections between ontologies, epistemologies, and AI. She employs feminist science studies frameworks to examine medical technologies and material-discursive practices around the body. Her metaphor of refraction—comparing how technologies reveal hidden discourses to how prisms refract light into visible spectra—has become influential in feminist technoscience research. She is particularly known for identifying 'intersectional hallucinations' in synthetic medical data, where AI systems generate data that misrepresents complex, overlapping identities.

Her major projects include 'Social complexity and fairness in synthetic medical data' (funded by WASP-HS and Vinnova), which examines how machine learning-generated data can overrepresent 'standard' patients while underrepresenting minorities, and 'The Constant Torment' project exploring prostate anxiety and its relationship to masculinity, resulting in her book 'A Cultural Biography of the Prostate.' Her recent publications span critical data studies, human-robot interaction, and the sociotechnical dimensions of AI, consistently examining how technologies shape and are shaped by social, cultural, and gendered contexts.

As a supervisor, Johnson mentors doctoral students Isabel García Velázquez, Alexandra Gribble, and Dominika Lisy, as well as postdoctoral researcher Maria Arnelid. Her research is supported by major grants from WASP-HS (NetX) and Vinnova, focusing on fair and representative synthetic data, and she participates in the Wallenberg Autonomous Systems Program (WASP) Humanities and Society initiative.

Johnson is actively involved in interdisciplinary research communities including the Center for Medical Humanities and Bioethics, Bodies Hub (researching bodies, identity, and gender), and the P6 research collective. These frameworks support her collaborative work at technology's intersection with gender, society, and healthcare, with practical implications for developing more equitable AI systems in medical contexts.