portrait of Dragana Kaurin

Dragana Kaurin is a human rights researcher and ethnographer working at the intersection of technology, human rights, and migration. Her ethnographic research includes documenting use of mobile phones by refugees in the EU and digital threats they face, humanitarian data protection policies and practices, and community tactics in documenting police violence in the United States. She is the founder and executive director of Localization Lab, a non-profit organization that researches ethnocentric bias in technology, tech adoption challenges in underrepresented and indigenous communities, and provides usability feedback to developers and platforms. Before entering the Human Rights Program at Columbia University, where she did research on civic tech and refugee rights, she worked in crisis information management and Communication For Development (C4D) at UN OCHA and UNICEF.

Between 2018-2021 she was a research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, where she wrote articles on humanitarian innovation and technosolutionism, digital identity and biometrics, public-private tech partnerships. In 2019 she published a report with Centre for International Governance Innovation on data protection and digital rights of refugees and asylum seekers, which she presented at the 2019 Oxford Media Law & Policy Summer Program. She speaks Serbo-Croatian, Arabic, French, and Spanish. Her research at Carr will focus on border surveillance and right to privacy for asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented individuals, building on past ethnographic research on the datafied border, with asylum seekers in the EU.