Technology & Human Rights Fellow (2026-27)
Marianna Poyares works at the intersection of data ethics, human rights, privacy, critical security and migration studies.
Combining OSINT, STS, and legal research with normative inquiry, her work focuses on the democratic and social impacts of new technologies of border security and migration governance. She has published and presented on topics such as border externalization through mobile apps, geofencing, genetic surveillance and intergenerational privacy harms, and the use of chatbots for humanitarian aid. She has also published on the social epistemology of solidarity beyond group membership, the foundations of human rights, and participatory observation as a critical research method.
She received her PhD from The New School for Social Research with a dissertation focusing on how the use of risk analysis algorithms in border and migration controls impacts normative conceptions of legitimacy and belonging. She is currently a postdoc at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law. Her work has been supported by the Brazilian Ministry of Education (CAPES), the Fulbright Program, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Humboldt Foundation, the Fritz Family Fund, and the Tech and Society Initiative at Georgetown.
Fellowship Project: During the tenure of the fellowship, Marianna will focus on developing a book manuscript which builds on her recent argument concerning “migrant data extractivism,” both drawing on and extending debates initiated by the scholarship on “surveillance capitalism.”