Introductory Video Course Outline | Syllabus | View Student Projects

I taught this class at Sarah Lawrence College in the fall of 2016. You can see the final student projects by clicking on the View Projects link.

The Human Rights and Technology Innovation Lab considers in what ways “21^st century technologies” like voice recognition, data visualization, smartphone applications, and social networking can (and cannot) be used to improve service provision by human rights organizations, human rights advocates and political actors. The class has two primary components: weekly seminars and a final project. The weekly seminars feature discussion, student presentations and outside lecturers. The final project will be a web-based multi-media research paper and/or digital art project.

The goals of the course will be achieved through three units of 4 weeks each. The first unit will look at ways in which technology can, and cannot, be used to improve the intake process for torture victims specifically, and trauma victims generally. The second unit will ask the same questions, but from a research perspective. The final unit will focus on multi-media publishing.

Academically, the class will feature concurrent streams related to fjve different disciplines: clinical psychology, software application development, data visualization, user experience design and communications. Although students will be exposed to all of these disciplines, they will not be expected to master them all.