Back to top

The virtual human rights library brings together resources from multiple libraries and information services, both internal and external, to create an online hub dedicated to the study of human rights. This curation is unique in its interdisciplinary concerns and focuses on writings and research from social sciences, humanities, and law.

The virtual library is continually updated with the latest academic research in issue areas, as well as with relevant films, recorded conversations, and other forms of media.

Searchable Database

Click into the dropdowns to select the disciplines, keywords, and media type for your search, and then hit "Apply."

Shoshana Zuboff The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: Public Affairs, 2019)

Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural...

Sandra G. Mayson "Bias In, Bias Out" Yale Law Journal 128.8 (2019): 2122-2473.

Police, prosecutors, judges, and other criminal justice actors increasingly use algorithmic risk assessment to estimate the likelihood that a person will commit future crime. As many scholars have noted, these algorithms tend to have disparate racial impacts. In response, critics...

Frank Pasquale The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016)

Every day, corporations are connecting the dots about our personal behavior—silently scrutinizing clues left behind by our work habits and Internet use. The data compiled and portraits created are incredibly detailed, to the point of being invasive. But who connects...

Ruha Benjamin Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019)

From electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms to workplace surveillance systems, technologies originally developed for policing and prisons have rapidly expanded into nonjuridical domains, including hospitals, schools, banking, social services, shopping malls, and digital life. Rooted in the logics of...

Ezra Winton, Michael Brendan Baker, Thomas Waugh Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010)

The activist documentary program Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle, which ran from 1967 to 1980 and produced films in both French and English, stands out as a particularly influential and original part of the National Film Board of Canada's critically acclaimed...

Lawrence Lessig Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 2000)

There’s a common belief that cyberspace cannot be regulated-that it is, in its very essence, immune from the government’s (or anyone else’s) control. Code, first published in 2000, argues that this belief is wrong. It is not in the...

Nick Couldry, Ulises Mejias The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019)

Just about any social need is now met with an opportunity to "connect" through digital means. But this convenience is not free—it is purchased with vast amounts of personal data transferred through shadowy backchannels to corporations using it to generate...

Kate Crawford, danah boyd "Critical Questions for Big Data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon" Information, Communication & Society 15.5 (2012): 662-679.

The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and other scholars are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Diverse groups...

Simone Browne Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015)

In Dark Matters, Simone Browne locates the conditions of blackness as a key site through which surveillance is practiced, narrated, and resisted. She shows how contemporary surveillance technologies and practices are informed by the long history of racial formation and...

Adi Kuntsman, Rebecca L. Stein Digital Militarism: Israel's Occupation in the Social Media Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016)

Israel's occupation has been transformed in the social media age. Over the last decade, military rule in the Palestinian territories grew more bloody and entrenched. In the same period, Israelis became some of the world's most active social media users...

Please Note:

While the Virtual Library is now live for use, we are still working to update its contents and improve its functionality.  

It is usable by all visitors, but the hyperlinks to materials listed are for UChicago community members with a CNet ID and password.  

Please direct feedback and suggestions to Kathleen Cavanaugh

For technical assistance, email pozenhumanrights @ uchicago.edu.

Join our mailing list to receive a weekly digest of Pozen-related news, opportunities, and events.