Description
For several years now, one of the Carr Center’s flagship programs has been the Human Rights and Technology Program. Under leadership from the center’s director, Mathias Risse, this program brought together between 9 and 12 virtual fellows each year who did work on technology from a human-rights (or also more broadly, from an ethics) standpoint, and has included the webinar series Towards Life 3.0: Ethics and Technology as well as a number of conferences and convenings.
For the Academic Year 2024/25, we plan to move this program away from its rather general orientation towards a more specific focus on some of the essential challenges of our time, on which the Carr Center can muster exceptional expertise and for which it is therefore the ideal home. At its core, the Human Rights and Technology Program during that year would be transformed into the Program on Surveillance Capitalism and Epistemic Agency. This would mean that a substantial number of our fellows who come under the umbrella of Human Rights and Technology (though not necessarily all) should work on projects in that program, and that the communications and convening activities of that program would focus on it. The projects would be oriented around Zuboff’s and Risse’s work but bring in researchers who develop these themes in their own ways.