Techno-Humanitarianism as an Emergent Regime – CDTS

Join the Centre for Diaspora & Transnational Studies for “Techno-Humanitarianism as an Emergent Regime” a public talk with Professors Sara Kendall, Jennifer Burrell and Kamari Maxine Clarke. 

This Public Talk is part of a 2023-2024 Andrew Mellon Sawyer Seminar titled “Evasion: Thinking the Underside of Surveillance.” 

About the talk:

Techno-humanitarianism presents a new paradigm for addressing violence and suffering. Bringing technological forms into a relationship with law and accountability mechanisms, it links advances in geospatial technologies, machine learning, and digital documentation with efforts to combat human rights violations and grave crimes. Yet these investments in techno-humanitarian forms also come up against law’s own technologies, which manifests in its gatekeeping role at the site of legal institutions. We explore three dimensions of techno-humanitarianism as well as the particular modes of knowing from which they derive:  (1) the relationship between science, technology and truth in the production of evidence; (2) the emergence of particular kinds of expertise to render technological interventions as comprehensible to judges and courts in institutions of international criminal law; and (3) the development of an ‘optics of seeing’ that makes visible particular events and truths while others are occluded. By examining the emergence of these domains of technology and knowledge production, together with the expert networks that are mobilized within the global North and South, we show how these constellations of projects, actors, technologies, and funding streams have converged to produce new horizons for accountability while furthering what we refer to as juridico-techno-scopic regimes.

Learn more about the speakers.