Dr Xin Zhan

Dr Xin Zhan is a Research Fellow at CAMHRA, studying how AI is transforming mental health, care, and social life.

Xin Zhan is a digital anthropologist with extensive experience in the mental health sector. Her research examines conversational AI, emotional support, human-AI relations, and algorithmic governance. She asks what it means to feel heard by a machine, how digital interaction can reshape people’s sense of reality and social relations, whether concepts such as “AI psychosis” and “digital addiction” adequately capture these experiences, and how AI is changing therapeutic practice and the therapeutic self.

She holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. Drawing on ethnographic research on coding and hacking, technical education, and algorithmic hiring, her doctoral work explored how digital systems organise access to employment, opportunity, and recognition. It also traced how technologies shape both the pursuit of imagined futures and the transformation of the self.

Her current research extends these questions to AI-mediated care, digital mental health, and the changing nature of therapeutic relationships and practices. Before joining SOAS, she taught in the Department of Sociology and the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridg

• Zhan, X. (2025). "Hacking the Future: The Magical Allure of Coding." Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2025.2601611.
• del Río, J. R. and Zhan, X. (2026). "Early Generative Technologies and the Western Aristocracy of Labour." In Udupa, S. and Hervik, P. (eds.), Handbook on Anthropology and Artificial Intelligence. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 211–223.

Xin Zhan's research explores how digital technologies become entangled with people's efforts to work, care, belong, and build a future. Her current research examines conversational AI as a form of emotional support, investigating how it is reshaping ideas of listening, care, and therapeutic relationships.

More broadly, her work focuses on the social and ethical implications of human–AI interaction, including questions of dependency, recognition, responsibility, and inequality. She is particularly interested in connecting ethnographic research with debates on AI safety, digital mental health, and therapeutic ethics.