Leadership

forest floor
Mathias Risse. 8/18/2023. “A Radical Reckoning with Cultural Devastation and Its Aftermath: Reflections on Wub-e-ke-niew’s We Have the Right to Exist”. Publisher's VersionAbstract
Wub-e-ke-niew’s enormously unsettling book We Have the Right to Exist presents a version of indigenous philosophical thought as an alternative way of being human in the world that creates profound insights in times of ecological crisis and technological disruption. He also confronts especially his White American readers with a blistering assessment of centuries of cultural devastation with ongoing effects on contemporary society. His messages are radical, and some of them are potentially divisive within the Native-American community because most Native Americans are not actually indigenous in terms of Wub-e-ke-niew’s standards. His views are very much worth reflecting on, and much of what he has to say about the consequences of the conquest and about the possibilities offered by Native American thought do not depend on these divisive views. His insights about Western civilization connect to internal criticisms articulated by thinkers like Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Latour and so make his text an excellent entry point for genuine engagement between Western and indigenous thought.

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Maggie Gates

Maggie Gates

Executive Director, Carr Center for Human Rights Policy

Maggie is the Executive Director for the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard Kennedy School. Before joining the Carr Center, Maggie was the...

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Carr Center 2021-2022 Annual Report
Carr Center Human Rights for Policy. 9/9/2022. Carr Center 2021-2022 Annual Report. Harvard Kennedy School. Publisher's VersionAbstract

The world is rapidly changing, and with it, the human rights landscape continues to shift. As these changes continue, so does the work of the Carr Center to bring human rights front-and-center into our everyday lives. Our 2021-2022 annual report highlights the Carr Center’s growing reach over the past year, thanks to the continued expansion of our programs and the dedication of our faculty, fellows, and students to human rights policy and research.

 

Our new research, publications, books, podcast episodes, and webinars over the course of the year—created in tandem with our faculty and fellows—have reached over 150 countries around the world, bringing the Carr Center’s mission into the homes, universities, and workplaces of thousands. To learn more about what the Carr Center accomplished during the 2021-2022 academic year, click the link below.

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The Fourth Generation of Human Rights: Epistemic Rights in Digital Lifeworlds
Mathias Risse. 9/17/2021. “The Fourth Generation of Human Rights: Epistemic Rights in Digital Lifeworlds.” Carr Center Discussion Paper Series. See full text.Abstract

In contrast to China’s enormous efforts to upgrade its system of governance to a new technological level built around a stupefying amount of data collection and electronic scoring, countries committed to democracy and human rights did not upgrade their systems. Instead of adjusting democracy and human rights to the new technological possibilities, those countries ended up with surveillance capitalism. It is vital for the sheer survival of those ideas about governance to perform such an upgrade. The present project aims to contribute to that. I propose a framework of epistemic actorhood in terms of four roles, and characterize digital lifeworlds and what matters about them, in terms of both how they fit in with Max Tegmark’s distinction among various stages of human life and how they give rise to their own episteme and the data episteme, with its immense possibilities of infopower (vocabulary inspired by Foucault). A set of epistemic rights that strengthen existing human rights—as part of a fourth generation of rights—is needed to protect epistemic actorhood in those roles, which would be a long way towards performing this kind of upgrade. In the long run, as we progress into Life 3.0, we need a new kind of human right, the right to the exercise of genuinely human intelligence. The good news is that, to the extent that we can substantiate the meaning of human life in the uncaring world that natural science describes, we can substantiate such a right vis-à-vis nonhuman intelligent life. We must hope that arguments of this sort can persuade a superior intelligence—which is by definition, massively beyond ours, and hard to anticipate.

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