Katherine Ritchie is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. She works primarily in philosophy of language, social ontology, and related areas in philosophy of mind and cog sci. Her current research is focused on the nature of social groups (teams, committees, races, genders), the semantics of terms that pick out social groups (plurals, collective nouns, slurs, generics), and our representations of groups. One central thread in her research is to show how metaphysics and insights about our mental and linguistic representational devices can help inform viable social-political projects