Science, Technology, and Human Rights Webinar Series

In collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences and the Human Rights Coalition, the Movement Engaged hub is hosting and organizing a webinar series on “Science, Technology, and Human Rights.” There have been three webinars so far, and there are three more planned for Spring 2023. Graduate students will be serving as moderators of these webinars.

Bangladesh in Transition: Navigating Democratic Reform, Digital Governance, and the Way Forward

Friday, May 16, 2025 10:00 AM to 12:30 PM EDT

Building for Progress: How Institutions Shape Human Rights and Technology

Friday, April 18, 2025 10:30 AM to 11:30 AM EDT
Online Location

Webinar | Social Bias in AI: Re-coding Innovation through Algorithmic Political Capitalism

Date: October 7, 2024

Time: 1:00AM to 12:15PM EDT (1 Hour)

Location: Virtual on Zoom

Our panelists discussed their current research paper which delves into the intricate interplay between societal and algorithmic bias, revealing how attempts to mitigate biases as a computational problem are inherently limited. Biases, deeply ingrained in social structures and conditions, were the seeds of the early generations of algorithmic development that underpin our present reality. This innovation, fostered and supported by government resources, harnessed political capitalism, shaping public policy around the development and deployment of algorithms for generations. However, this public policy is a robust, complex system, exhibiting self-organization, adaptive interactions, and emergent properties that transform individual behaviors into collective phenomena. In other words, public policy that aims to curb negative impacts must operate across multiple levels—community, local, state, and federal—and evaluate their effects through adaptive feedback mechanisms. This encompasses the use of user data in predictive analytics markets, the physical and human infrastructure affected by artificial intelligence, the optimization and feedback mechanisms that have fostered extremism and radicalization, and the underexamined user bias that has shifted an unbalanced power dynamic between user and platform owner, all of which are symptoms of this complex system. Dale and Carter discussed their analytic framework – “algorithmic political capitalism” to begin unravelling the myriad forces influencing outcomes, facilitate more effective navigation of our dynamic and evolving social landscape, and a means to democratize social power around a technology that shapes societal institutions at the speed of competition and rapid adoption.

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Webinar | Human Rights, Ethics, and the Importance of Evidence-Based Research

Date: March 21, 2024
Time: 12pm to 1pm (1 Hour)

Location: Virtual on Zoom

The focal point of the webinar is the role of science in work on ethics and human rights. After outlining the intimate relationship between human rights and ethics, Prof. Kristen Renwick Monroe offers concrete illustrations of how empirical, evidence-based research plays a critical role in revealing important, often counter-intuitive, findings about human rights. Prof. Monroe’s trio of books on the study of altruism and moral choice (listed below) discovered how identity trumps choice, setting a menu of options that sets and delineates the range of choices found available cognitively, not just morally. The work exposed limitations in rational choice theory, the dominant theory in social science and one underlying economics, cost-benefit analysis, psychology, and evolutionary biology. It modified the traditional philosophical understanding of the importance of how we make moral choices, challenging assumptions underlying Utilitarianism and Kantian ethical theory.

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Webinar | Forced Displacement: A Quantitative Modeling Perspective

Date: November 30, 2023

Time: 11am to Noon (1 Hour)

Location: Virtual on Zoom

The recent and ongoing conflicts including the war in Ukraine together with climate deterioration might lead to a century of unprecedented forced displacement. This webinar will portray the availability of data, and capabilities of quantitative analysis and statistical modeling approaches in providing insights for migration researchers and human rights practitioners to gain a clearer understanding of the magnitude, indicators, and nature of forced displacement phenomena. We will review the characteristics of forced displacement data collected by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and other organizations. We will also review common strategies for quantitative analyses of these data in order to gain insights on human movement phenomena from global forced displacement trends to country-specific internal forced displacement.

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Webinar: ArtificiaI Intelligence and the Rise of Digital Repression

Date: April 20, 2023 | 11am-12pm

Location: Zoom Webinar

This webinar will examine the interplay between Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology, surveillance practices, and global governance norms. AI technology has extended the power of states to track citizens due to advances in biometric identification systems, social media monitoring, and predictive policing techniques. While entrenched autocracies are making eager use of these new capacities, more open political systems are also incorporating these tools, raising troubling questions about the impact on due process, free expression, and active citizenship. How will the growing availability of AI technologies impact democratic governance, fuel repressive practices, or undermine the rule of law? The answer depends on efforts by international organizations, national governments, civil society groups, and the wider global community to craft new norms around AI. What those norms look like and how they will shape existing practice and future innovation is hotly debated. Participants will come away with a better understanding about the stakes involved in these conversations and the ensuing policy implications.

Webinar: The Right to Science and Infectious Diseases: Past, Present and Future

Date: March 9, 2023 | 11AM to 12PM EST
Zoom Webinar

This webinar will investigate the right of everyone to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications (“right to science”) and the reasons why this right is necessary and important. Participants will learn about the applications of states’ essential obligations under the right to science to develop, diffuse, and conserve science; what these obligations actually mean; and explore science and human rights in the context of infectious diseases. Panelists will discuss how the right to science framework is a necessary complement to attaining the right to the highest available standard of physical and mental health, and other human rights.

Webinar: Visible.lgbt: Innovation on Documenting LGBTQ+ Rights Violations in Mexico

Date: December 8, 2022 | 11am-12pm

Location: Zoom Webinar

The collection of data related to at-risk populations in Latin America remains a pending obligation for the region's national governments. With respect to LGBTQ+ people, international bodies have revealed that the existing data do not reflect the full dimensions of the violence and discrimination experienced by queer persons in the Americas. Visible is a non-governmental platform developed by a Mexican NGO, with the support of Georgetown University. It allows for the collection of violent and discriminatory incidents against LGBTQ+ people, and demonstrates how ICTs can counter societal misinformation and provide information to decision makers to create data-driven inclusive policies.

Webinar | Community-Owned Water Baseline Data: Science and Human Rights for Community Power Building

Date: June 8, 2022 | 11:00 AM to 12:00 PM EDT

Location: Virtual Online

This webinar focuses on the right to water in communities impacted by Haiti’s three gold mining and exploitation permits. The “spillover” effects of gold mining in Haiti have serious implications for water and other natural resources, extending its impact on local communities.

The Global Justice Clinic at New York University Law School has provided technical support to the Kolektif Jistis Min (Justice in Mining Collective, or KJM), a group of Haitian social movement organizations formed to support communities in Haiti’s mineral belt and to encourage a national dialogue about the industry. KJM’s aim is to educate affected communities on the consequences of mining for water as well as the environment, work, agriculture, and land, to push for national transparency and a debate on mining.

Our panelists include human rights and legal experts Margaret Satterwaite and Ellie Happel from the Global Justice Clinic, hydrologists Beth Hoagland and Tess Russo, and Haitian activist and organizer Olriche Jean Pierre from KJM. Dr. John Dale, Director of Movement Engaged and Associate Professor of Sociology at George Mason University, will moderate the panel.

They will discuss the lessons they have learned from the dialogue between scientific and local indigenous knowledge produced during their collaboration, and how these forms of knowledge may shape and become shaped by human rights principles and law. Additionally, the panel address the Importance of community participation and leadership in every phase of the study, and the challenges of negotiating when local knowledge versus scientific knowledge (or human rights principles) should prevail; how to translate data into advocacy for community rights, particularly in the context of an absent State; and how generalizable their project might be for contexts outside Haiti.

Note: This Zoom webinar will provide simultaneous translation channels in Haitian Creole and English. Attendees can choose the channel they prefer.