Why provoke? Let’s unsettle technology and human rights
Our lives are interwoven with fast-changing digital technologies. After so many scandals and exposés, we all know that we must keep abreast of the dangers and dilemmas technology poses for human rights and humanity. Yet, every day, rights practitioners and civic activists must work with digital technology. Communication technologies are increasingly key to human rights fact-finding and advocacy, and civic activists rely heavily on digitally-mediated public spheres.
Big tech, however, has a woeful reputation with respect to making space for human rights practices and principles in the design and implementation of their technologies.
That’s why we at the University of Cambridge’s Centre of Governance and Human Rights (CGHR) are publishing a series of provocations for practitioners at the intersection of human rights and technology. We wrote these provocations to help unsettle what has become sedimented at this intersection, either because it has become naturalised as ‘how things are’ or because it has been begrudgingly accepted as ‘how things have to be’. With a nod to boyd and Crawford’s ‘Six Provocations for Big Data’, our aim is to spark opportunities for reflection and equal collaboration in the co-construction of technologies and knowledge among human rights practitioners, civic activists and technologists.
Ultimately, we hope to make more space in digital public spheres for voices from the grassroots to speak and to be seen on their own terms. In an age of pervasive digital technologies, having a voice also involves being able to remain silent or invisible.
How these provocations came about
We recently set out a new mission statement at CGHR, one which reflects our years of work as well as our aims for the future. We wrote, in part:
‘We have learnt that the crucial spaces for new thinking and action on justice, well-being, and citizen voice challenges lie at intersections and in interactions between practice and scholarship, between disciplines, and between individuals and institutions across the world.’
For CGHR Co-Directors Ella and Sharath, these experiences forged our Centre’s identity and purpose in its first decade. In shaping a fresh strategy for CGHR’s second decade, we sought to distill the most essential insights from our Centre’s extensive praxis research.
For us, praxis research is about co-designing research in collaboration with the practitioners, activists, and citizens whose worlds we study so that it supports mutual understandings of a better future. It is about design and research moving forwards in a dialectic, where research informs design and design informs research. It is about making interventions that advance scholarship, make spaces for conversations, and address problems. At CGHR, we have come to appreciate praxis research as a rich, ongoing, collaborative learning journey grounded in the aim of meaningful action in the world.
Much of our praxis research revolves around our academic tech start-ups, Africa’s Voices, Katikati, and The Whistle. In conversations with our start-up partners, we realised the insights we uncovered in our reflections on CGHR’s first decade were striking a chord with their experiences, so we hatched a plan to circulate them more widely in the hopes of sparking new conversations, collaborations and change.
This plan sprung to life when Sebastián joined CGHR as our Post-Doctoral Scholar. We set aside research time to think and draft together, folding Sebastián’s complementary research into the mix.
These resulting Provocations reflect CGHR priorities from the near past and for the future, and they also resonate with our individual research and project work. That we share these insights across our separate and collective work was one of the most rewarding discoveries of the process, as well as indicative of a broader need to rethink the intersections of technology and human rights. Writing these provocations was a collaborative, exciting and generative process, and next we are turning our provocations into interventions — stay tuned!
Our collaborators
These provocations are co-authored by Sebastián, Ella and Sharath, but a much wider group of people and organisations played crucial roles in shaping them.
Foremost is everyone involved in the academic tech start-ups connected to CGHR. The team at The Whistle have developed and lived the values of ‘slow tech’ and a ‘methodology of solidarity’. The researchers and team involved in Africa’s Voices have foregrounded pluralism and tolerance for ambiguity in their unique socio-technical designs. Our colleagues at Katikati are wrestling with the tension between open-endedness and boundedness in how communication technology sustains communicative spaces over time. Most recently, Sebastián’s collaboration with digital rights organisations in Latin America made evident the relevance of community-building and solidarity to invent and implement alternative imaginaries.
We are also thankful to Tomás Gianelli O’Ryan for the design of this Medium blog and the incredible animations.
Returning to CGHR’s Mission Statement, at its core is this commitment:
‘Thinking with practitioners, at CGHR we are reimagining how justice, solidarity and citizen voice can flourish with or against technology.’
We hope these Provocations are one such reimagining.
