#IAS_NUQ Global Fellow Colloquium
Northwestern University in Qatar
Education City, Qatar +974 4454 5100
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This colloquium will delve into the intersections of law and artificial intelligence (AI) by focusing on the 'lived life' of the law in postcolonial contexts, exploring how marginalized communities experience and navigate the legal landscapes shaped by AI, moving beyond conventional discussions around privacy, fairness, and individual rights. Instead, it will consider how democratic potentials emerge through everyday legal interactions.
Through a digital ethnography of lawyer and activist responses to surveillance in Delhi, Sagnik’s research traces the dynamics between local legal practices and universal rights categories. By exploring interactions among lawyers, activists, citizens, and the state, this colloquium will uncover how these everyday engagements with legal categories contribute to democratic expressions of citizenship and collective rights in the age of algorithmic surveillance. Sagnik proposes a grounded understanding of the law as shaped by these mobilizations, opening up new perspectives on how AI-driven surveillance impacts social justice and democratic participation.
Sagnik Dutta is an associate professor at OP Jindal Global University. Their research interests include global/postcolonial approaches to counterterrorism, data colonialism, data justice, secularism, gender, and minority citizenship. Their work lies at the intersection of political theory, legal anthropology, postcolonial/decolonial theory, and gender studies.
As part of their fellowship at #IAS_NUQ, Dutta seeks to explore the interaction between various scales of legal activism and advance scholarship on algorithmic surveillance and critical studies of algorithms beyond abstract legal categories. Dutta's project is an ethnographic exploration of everyday negotiations between lawyers and digital rights activists, with algorithmic surveillance by the state in Delhi, India. By examining engagements with the law, Dutta aims to understand how local legal cultures shape legal consciousness in situations of surveillance.
DATE
Wednesday, January 15, 2025
TIME
1:00 p.m. – 2:15 p.m.
LOCATION
Room 1-300