[Air-L] Call for Abstracts, Law & Society Association: Translating human rights in the digital age

[Sara Leila Margaret Davis]

Dear colleagues,
We invite abstracts for our proposed session for the Law and Society
Association annual meeting in 2024. Abstracts must be in clear, simple
English, max 2000 characters. More info on the conference is here
<https://www.lawandsociety.org>.
best
Meg

*

*Call for Abstracts*


*Translating human rights in the digital age *

*Law and Society Association Annual Meetings, Denver, June 6 - 9, 2024*


*Sara (Meg) Davis (University of Warwick) and Matt Canfield (Leiden Law
School) *



Digitization and datafication are at the forefront of expanding
inequalities. Scholars have described how they produce new forms of
colonialism and capitalism through data extractivism and surveillance
(Cohen 2019, Zuboff 2019, Couldry and Mejias 2020); impose barriers to
social rights (UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Health 2023), and
amplify racial discrimination (Eubanks 2018, Benjamin 2019). At the same
time, digitization is sparking transformative social movements. It is
creating new agential capacities for women (Maslen and Lupton 2018) and new
forms of solidarity, for instance around women’s rights, sexual orientation
and gender identity, and health (Waldman et al 2018; Davis et al 2023) as
well as new spaces for mobilization and advocacy (Niezen 2020).



This panel invites papers that explore how activists in diverse contexts
are mobilizing human rights in relation to data and the digital
transformation. While some have critiqued the continuing viability of human
rights as a frame for social justice (Billaud 2017, Moyn 2018, Whyte 2019),
anthropologists see a new vitality in the diverse ways that human rights
are “appropriated, adapted and redefined” to fit a variety of contexts
(Merry 2018, Canfield 2022, Goodale 2022). Drawing on diverse field sites
and conceptual lenses, including ethnographic (and digital ethnographic)
research in and from the Majority and Minority worlds, we seek to
understand how activists respond to challenges of digital access,
datafication, discrimination, and platform capitalism given increasingly
diffuse notions of accountability, privacy, and equality by translating
human rights. We ask: How are activists redefining and applying human
rights in a rapidly shifting realm where the role of the state, as primary
duty-bearer, is frequently nebulous, and where the private sector
dominates? What can anthropology and ethnographic methods offer to
understanding human rights in the digital age?


Please submit abstracts by October 13th to m.c.canfield at law.leidenuniv.nl
and sara.davis at warwick.ac.uk




-- 
*Sara (Meg) Davis, Ph.D.*
*Research Associate, *Global Governance Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute
*Professor,* Digital Health and Rights, University of Warwick
Digital Health and Rights Project
<https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/research/research-projects/digital-health-rights/>
Book: *The Uncounted: Politics of Data in Global Health
<https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/uncounted/C0CC81C0F03D1822D05C13EE31FA0957#fndtn-metrics>*
Ted talk: The Uncounted: The people left out of health data
<https://www.ted.com/talks/sara_meg_davis_the_uncounted_the_people_left_out_of_health_data>