Justice: Race, Digital Media, & Human Rights Activism

Undergraduate / Graduate

How have digital media platforms influenced and motivated recent developments in human rights activism? Can literature, art, and film contribute to political debate and systemic change as much as on-the-ground protest? In this interdisciplinary seminar, we will explore a variety of ways that grassroots activists, writers, artists, and filmmakers have made inventive use of digital media to aid in political struggles for refugee rights, gender equality, environmental justice, police abolition, data protection and privacy, and an economy founded on fair labor practices. We will be especially attuned to how their practices advocate for communities of color and other marginalized groups, who are disproportionately impacted by regimes of surveillance, state violence, and capitalist expansion. In addition to resources and tools created by digital transparency activists, we will examine how cultural practitioners make political interventions and claims with literature, art, media, and other nontraditional forms of engagement. These cultural case studies will include films produced with iPhones and drones that document the global refugee crisis, digital poems concerning discrimination against immigrants, new media art installations that critique algorithm-driven predictive policing, and border-crossing robotic sculptures, among others.