Summer course on "Advancing Human Rights Through Technology"

HRTS 543: Advancing Human Rights through Technology

Fully online course -- 7 weeks, Summer Session 2 (July-August 2025)

Modern technologies -- like artificial intelligence (AI), smartphones, social media platforms, and encryption -- open doors for human rights advocates. At the same time, they create new risks and harms in the form of bias and discrimination, disinformation, online and physical attacks, surveillance, and more.

This course examines the real-world promises and challenges of modern technologies for human rights advocacy. The goal is to offer a critical analysis of how human rights defenders can harness the power of technology for documentation, reporting, protest, and lobbying, while paying close attention to the potential risks and harms arising from these technologies. 

Join this course offered by the University of Arizona’s Program in Human Rights Practice in association with the Graduate Certificate in Human Rights and Technology. HRTS 543 has no pre-requisites and is open to all UA graduate students from AZ Online and Main Campus. 

For more info, contact the instructor, Dr. Onur Bakiner, at bakinero@seattleu.edu.