SHU Students Attend Human Rights Conference at Oxford

Forum focuses on benefits and dangers new technology poses to human rights

Six Sacred Heart University students from different schools and majors traveled to England recently for the Oxford Consortium for Human Rights. Each brought unique perspectives on this year’s topic, which examined technology’s role in peoples’ lives.

The participating SHU students were Jenna Bargisen ’23, Jacqueline Gonzalez ’25, Abigail Lockwood ’23, Mira Poelzer’25, Nora Serrao ’25 and Nicole Sperling ’24. They joined 23 other student participants from around the world.

The consortium concentrated on technology and human rights and featured sessions led by scholars and human rights activists. “I expected to just sit and listen and take everything in,” said Bargisen, a communication disorders major and captain of Sacred Heart’s debate team. “But it turned out to be much more introspective than I thought it would be. While it was highly collaborative, I learned the most about myself and discovered the people I want to advocate for.”

Speakers included scholars from Oxford University and faculty from the Oxford Consortium of Human Rights, along with specialists such as Sir Richard Barrons, former UK Armed Forces general. They discussed such topics as digital ethics, democracy and new technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and health care, education and technology, algorithms and surveillance capitalism. Discussions also focused on technology in war, AI and humanity, bio-modifications and genetic privacy, generative identities and cryptocurrency.

The SHU students joined conversations that lamented the fact that helpful technology may not be readily available for people who cannot afford it, and they talked about troublesome technology that presents privacy issues and other problems. For example, Bargisen said a headband used in China to gauge students’ attention during class can be very intrusive. “For someone with ADHD or another neurodivergence, this would be devastating,” she said.

Learning from each other

The gathering’s international aspect appealed to Sperling, a psychology major, who said the diverse group of students came together with the common goal of wanting to find solutions. “And something special that Sacred Heart did was to select students for the conference who are from different colleges with varying majors. Our group looked at everything from different perspectives, and we learned from each other,” Sperling said.

The SHU students’ conference presentation dealt with the AI-driven ChatGPT. They discussed the ethical, educational, mental health, technical and policy aspects surrounding its use and connection to human rights, such as its potential to empower people with disabilities.

One person alone cannot ensure human rights remain paramount in an ever-changing world, commented Gonzalez, a political science major. “But rather, it takes a community that believes in the value of human rights to uphold and maintain them in a society. It’s the responsibility that we each have as humans,” she said.

Gonzalez enjoyed seeing how her views as a political science student compared to the opinions of those from other disciplines. “It was interesting to see how our worlds mesh in terms of how technology can benefit or be a disadvantage, or both, in our respective spheres,” she said.

Exploring new topics

The SHU students said the conference introduced them to some issues they had not considered. “It opened my eyes to things like cognitive bias in AI applications and AI training,” said Serrao, an elementary education STEM major. “And I now know the importance of protecting your personal data. This experience gave me a lot of hope for the world, but it also gave me a lot of concern for the future.”

Poelzer, an international student from Germany studying economics and information technology at SHU, agreed, saying potential dangers must be examined. “Because of my majors, this conference was perfect for me,” she said. “We need more diversity in the technology sector. And we need to make sure our algorithms are well trained. The dangers are outweighing the benefits right now, and we need to turn that around.” She also pointed to a paradox—while more diversified data is needed to create unbiased algorithms, privacy is a basic human right that needs to be protected, therefore individuals should be wary of sharing the necessary data to create the unbiased algorithms.

Lockwood, a political science major minoring in human rights and social justice, found the conference thought-provoking. “I want to go into policy, so what I took away from the experience is that we really need to keep track of what our technology is doing and figure out how to best use it,” she said.

“Technology has such a big impact, even at the local level,” Lockwood added. “I’m excited to take what I learned and make sure our rights are being represented at the state and local levels. We need policies that will protect the individual while enhancing our ability to use technology to get rid of discrimination and imbalances we have in society.”

Hersher Institute supports conference attendance

Sacred Heart paid the students’ conference fees and travel costs through its Hersher Institute for Applied Ethics, opening the trip to all students, rather than only those who could afford it. Professors Brian Stiltner and Christine Susienka, the institute’s co-directors, served as the trip’s faculty advisors. The deans of each SHU college further supported the development of the initiative and the selection of participants.

“We all came away with the realization that new technology and artificial intelligence has changed the world so rapidly that it creates concerns for people’s justice and privacy, which are basic human rights,” said Stiltner. “Human rights are so interwoven with every other issue, from wars being fought, to bioethics and medical care, to truth in journalism and other classic topics.”

He said students benefit from experiences like attending the Oxford conference “because it inspires them to act and to connect human rights to their diverse majors.” They also gain a worldwide network of faculty and students who share their passion for human rights, Stiltner added.

Susienka agreed that connecting with others of a similar mindset will benefit the students in their futures, and she said it also got them thinking about careers they might pursue. “Uniting students in various majors showed them different technology and human rights related career paths that are open to them,” she said. “When I was an undergraduate, traveling internationally led me to see the world in a different way. It is personally enriching to be able to ask big questions with people from different parts of the world.”

The students plan to use their new knowledge and understanding to continue the dialogue in their own communities. They said they learned their ideas matter, and they will pursue the complicated issues of technology and human rights with the understanding that their generation will play an important role in determining how the two coexist.

Inset: Top row, from left, are Jenna Bargisen, Professor Brian Stiltner, Nicole Sperling, Professor Christine Susienka and Mira Poelzer; bottom row, from left, are Jacqueline Gonzalez, Abigail Lockwood and Nora Serrao. Photos by Tatiana Shirasaki