Human Rights Investigations Lab
Launched in Fall 2019, the Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas is dedicated to training a new generation of human rights researchers in online open source investigations to support non-governmental organizations, news outlets, and other advocacy partners. Housed in the Research Center for the Americas (RCA) at UC Santa Cruz, the lab harnesses digital technologies to address and confront human rights violations, extending the RCA’s commitment to “Dialogues without Borders” into the digital realm. 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 Human Rights Investigations Lab is being funded by The Humanities Institute, the Santa Cruz Institute for Social Transformation, the Division of Graduate Studies, and other partners.
- Director: Sylvanna Falcón, RCA Director and Associate Professor of Latin American and Latino/a Studies
- Lab Advisor: Saskia Nauenberg Dunkell, Research Program Manager, The Humanities Institute
Recent News and Profiles
- Digital detectives: Advancing human rights through internet investigations
- Fighting ‘desinformación’
- Undergraduate Profile: Montserrat Lopez
- Two UC Santa Cruz programs win funding for public interest technology
- Undergraduate Profile: Monica Estrada Arias
- UC Santa Cruz Human Rights Lab investigates social unrest in Chile
- Slugs and Steins with Sylvanna M. Falcón: The Evolving Practice of Human Rights Accountability
- New Human Rights Lab Trains Students to Investigate Wrongdoing
For more information, please visit the Human Rights Investigations Lab for the Americas website or email hrlab@ucsc.edu.
Photo of the Human Rights Lab inaugural cohort of students by Director Sylvanna Falcón.