Book Launch: André Dao, Human Rights for the data society (Hybrid)

This event is cohosted by The Centre for Law & Social Change (SOAS). The Centre for Law and Social Change is a place for projects encouraging interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral and intergenerational collaboration, with a focus on progressive social change and a commitment to active anti-racist, feminist, and decolonial practice. The event is hybrid and we will send a joining link to those who have registered. In-person at SOAS, RG01, Main Building, ground floor. We will be providing some iftar snacks, feel free to bring your own, we will have a space available from sunset. Wheelchair accessible venue. About the author: Dr André Dao is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Laureate Program in Global Corporations and International Law at the Melbourne Law School. He is the author of Human rights for the data society: Big Tech, the UN and the datafication of rights (CUP, 2026), and Anam (Picador, 2023). About the book: In the 2010s, the United Nations embarked on a series of projects to embrace and respond to digital data technologies as part of its human rights agenda. Human rights for the data society argues that these efforts produced a world in which the biggest technology corporations and their data technologies are widely accepted as indispensable to the international human rights project. The book names this world the data society. The UN did this through a series of technical projects during the 2010s that produce what one might call ‘datafied’ forms of human rights. In these emerging forms of human rights, core concepts and practices are understood by reference to or performed through digital data technologies. The central implication of this argument is that when human rights practitioners – at the UN and beyond – use datafied forms of human rights, they play a significant role in making the data society possible. By the same token, they also play a significant role in foreclosing alternative possibilities – of worlds in which human rights and digital data technologies might be imagined differently.