Sylvanna M. Falcón, founder of UC Santa Cruz’s Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas, will explain how human rights accountability has shifted in the digital realm and the ways in which a new generation of human rights activists are needed with critical digital literacy skills in search for the truth.

Dr. Falcón founded Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas in September 2019. The Lab’s social justice mission is to track and monitor ongoing humanitarian, environmental and socio-political crises throughout the Americas by using open source investigative methods to promote justice and achieve accountability for communities adversely affected by human rights violations. The lab offers digital verification support to non-governmental organizations, news outlets, and other advocacy partners.

Sylvanna M. Falcón, Associate Professor, Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) at UC Santa Cruz.
As Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino Studies (LALS) at the University of California, Santa Cruz, her research and teaching interests are in human rights, transnational and decolonial feminism, racism and antiracism, open source investigations, and transitional justice in Peru. She is a former United Nations consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women. Dr. Falcón authored the award-winning book Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activists inside the United Nations, [University of Washington Press, 2016 – awarded the National Women’s Studies Association Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Award] and the co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship [under contract with Rutgers University Press] and New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights [Routledge, 2011]. Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including International Journal of Transitional Justice, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Feminism.