Taught at the Pratt School of Information, this seminar introduced students to the foundations of information rights, the harms produced by information systems, and the creative and political strategies communities use to push back.
This fall, I taught Information and Human Rights at the Pratt School of Information for the first time. The course invites students to examine information as a site of power, struggle, and possibility.
We moved through three major sections:
- Information as a Right: Foundational frameworks that situate information within ethical, legal, and human rights contexts and examine information as a right in its own terms.
- Information as a Harm: How information systems harm rights across borders and movement, privacy and self-determination, labor and social welfare, knowledge and truth, and expression and speech.
- Information as an Enabler: How information practices support rights through transparency and accountability, storytelling and archives, obfuscation and refusal, and organizing and commons based approaches.This section included workshops on transparency tools, community archives, narrative and art based strategies, and hands on sessions focused on tactics of refusal, privacy, and obfuscation.
Throughout the semester, we drew from classic theory, contemporary science and technology studies scholars, artists, and investigative reporting. Many of our most meaningful discussions came from real time examples of information systems unfolding in the news, which showed how quickly the landscape shifts and how urgently these frameworks matter.
If you are interested in how information policy and human rights intersect, how to teach these issues today, or how students are thinking through questions of autonomy, harm, and resistance, you can read the full syllabus here.
I plan to reteach this class next fall and would love to hear suggestions to improve the syllabus.