Oxford Summer 2023 New Technology & Human Rights
Katie Dwyer
July 3 – 9, 2023
New technology is one of the major drivers of change in human society today. But what does all this new digital, biological and renewable technology mean for human rights?
This workshop will explore the relationship between many new technologies emerging across human society and people’s continuous demands for human rights. The course will examine how the impact of new technology is sometimes positive and enabling of human rights, sometimes negative and restrictive, and often ambivalent and uncertain.
Students will study particular technological revolutions in communications, medicine, governance, surveillance, education, weapons, energy and manufacturing to explore their implications for traditional human rights to heath, privacy, free speech, free association, and the laws of war. More profoundly, the workshop will explore how new technology is changing our experience of being human – ontology itself - as we live an increasingly hybrid life as computerized humanity. This shift poses fundamental questions about the notion of the human in human rights, and looks set to create a new generation of rights and duties. These must focus especially on the important values of autonomy, individuality and authenticity that underpin our rights as human beings.
By the end of the course, students will have a clear understanding of the risks and opportunities to human rights in new technology, and be better equipped to work as activists and policymakers in this rapidly developing area of rights.
The course will be taught by leading scholars from the University of Oxford and visiting human rights activists working on and with new technology of various kinds.