Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the numerous people and institutions that made this book possible. First and foremost, we would like to thank the contributors, who first gathered in October 2015 at the University of Connecticut’s Human Rights Institute to share their ideas and lay the groundwork for the theoretical approaches to understanding technology and human rights that are introduced in this volume. We are deeply appreciative of the financial support provided by the University of Connecticut’s Human Rights Institute for that initial workshop, as well as crucial logistical and administrative support provided by Rachel Jackson and Lyndsay Nalbandian.

We are fortunate that our home institutions (University of Connecticut School of Law and Carnegie Mellon University) were willing and able to provide the financial support that allows us to offer this book under a Gold Open Access license. This license allows anyone anywhere around the world to read, download, and utilize the material in this volume directly from Cambridge University Press under a Creative Commons license. We are proud of this arrangement and hope that it becomes the norm for all scholarly work that relates to human rights and human flourishing.

Jay Aronson would like to acknowledge Humanity United, MacArthur Foundation, and Oak Foundation for their generous support of his scholarship, and the work of the Center for Human Rights Science at Carnegie Mellon, over the past several years. Molly Land would like to thank the School of Law for summer fellowship support for her research on these issues.

We also thank Tatyana Marugg, Katherine Graichen, Magdalena Narozniak, and Sarah Hamilton at the University of Connecticut School of Law for their outstanding editing and research assistance.

It almost goes without saying that a project like this demands sacrifice from family members at critical points of the editorial process. Our deepest thanks to our families for their love, patience, and support throughout the production of this volume.

Finally, we would like to express our greatest debt to the practitioners and frontline defenders who continue to inspire us and motivate our efforts to understand the profound impacts that technology is having on human rights advocacy and accountability.