Jennifer Cearns

Jennifer Cearns is an AI Anthropologist researching how people form relationships — with one another, and with intelligent technologies.

Her work looks at human–AI intimacy: therapeutic AI, romantic relationships with AI companions, and grief technology that lets people maintain connections with the dead. Cearns is interested in how generative AI is reshaping ideas of the self, empathy, and connection in increasingly mediated worlds.

A Lecturer in AI in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester, and Series Editor of the "Anthropology & AI" series at the Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Cearns previously held academic positions at KU Leuven, UCL, the Alan Turing Institute, and the Royal Anthropological Institute.

In April 2026, Cearns gave a TED talk, "How AI Makes Us More Human," in Vancouver. Her research and commentary have appeared on BBC News, BBC Radio 4, BBC Click, and in a Netflix documentary series on AI relationships. She writes and speaks regularly for both academic and public audiences.

Cearns' research is grounded in long-term ethnographic fieldwork across Brazil, Cuba, the United States, Guyana, Panama, Mexico, Spain, and the UK. Before returning to academia, she spent over a decade as a UX consultant (eBay, Airbnb, Macmillan, TransferWise, and others), bringing anthropological method to how digital systems are actually built.

Her first book, "Circulating Culture," was shortlisted for both the Association of Latina and Latino Anthropologists First Book Prize and the Society for Latin American & Caribbean Anthropology Book Prize. Her next book, "Intelligent Artifice," on AI companionship and grief technology, is currently in progress.