If there is one thing that social justice practitioners should care about, it is the wellbeing of the individuals for whom their work is designed. And for the most part, they do. But we work in big institutions that are often difficult ships to turn, and working in such cumbersome environments does not mesh well with needs and issues that are changing faster than ever. The proliferation of technologies and the availability of increasingly large and diverse data sets are changing the way we interact with people, where and how we get data (read: personal information) and the vulnerabilities for keeping that data safe. What principles do we need in order to be ethical in our present environment?
We are not using technology enough to better our advocacy, to make our research outputs stronger, to track our theories of change and to prove our effectiveness.
Certainly, as a human rights community we are already proving that the use of new technology helps us “do better research”, but we are not using it enough to better our advocacy, to make our research outputs stronger, to track our theories of change and to prove our effectiveness. More specifically, we need to address the issues around agency (i.e., what is the role of the people we claim to represent?) and consent (i.e., whose permission do we have, whose data are we using, and what are we using it for?). These issues have always existed in our work and have often been criticized as being based in power dichotomies: us/them, north/south, or extractive/participatory research methods.
