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The Rights Track

The Rights Track

Written by: Todd Landman
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 The Rights Track podcast gets the hard facts about the human rights challenges facing the world today and aims to get our thinking about human rights on the right track.Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs Science Social Sciences
Episodes
  • The Rights Track: Sound Evidence on Human Rights and Modern Slavery - SPECIAL EPISODE

    The Rights Track: Sound Evidence on Human Rights and Modern Slavery - SPECIAL EPISODE
    Sep 6 2022
    In this special BONUS episode of the podcast, Todd is joined by Rights Track producer Chris Garrington of Research Podcasts to discuss their recently published book The Rights Track: Sound Evidence on Human Rights and Modern Slavery. The book, published by Anthem Press is launched today (September 6, 2022) at a special event hosted by the University of Nottingham's Rights Lab, funders of Series 3-5 of the podcast. Transcript Todd Landman 0:01 Welcome to The Rights Track podcast, which gets the hard facts about the human rights challenges facing us today. I'm Todd Landman. In this special episode of the podcast, I'm delighted to be joined by Rights Track producer, Chris Garrington to discuss our new book, The Rights Track: Sound Evidence on Human Rights and Modern Slavery, which was published in July. Chris and I launched The Rights Track podcast together in 2015, and have just finished production of a seventh series. Chris is the director and owner of Research Podcasts Limited, which specialises in consultancy, training and podcast production for researchers and students. So, welcome to this side of the mic, Chris. Christine Garrington 0:38 Thanks, Todd. I was gonna say it feels strange to be here. But of course, it doesn't feel strange at all, because I'm always here for recordings of Rights Track episodes, but it does feel strange, slightly strange. I'm not gonna lie to be speaking into the mic and be having a proper conversation with you in this way. But wonderful. Todd Landman 0:55 You're now the guest, you are not sitting behind the scenes trying to make the guests sound fantastic. So Chris, I wanted to start with, when did podcasts first enter into your head? Christine Garrington 1:06 Oh, that's a really good question. So you know, Todd, but our listeners won't know that my background was in journalism. So I came straight out of university and trained to be a journalist back in the late 80s, early 90s. And spent most of that time working in radio - in BBC local radio in Essex. And then when radio five live launched here in the UK, in the mid 90s I worked there. So I developed if you like, my love of audio, my passion around the power of audio to tell stories, to report news, as well as obviously, all of the technical and editorial skills required to do that well, whilst working as a radio journalist. But jump forward a decade after leaving the BBC and doing a few different things and living abroad for a while, I came back to the UK and ended up working a little bit by chance, if I can be honest there, working in a research institute at the University of Essex. Todd Landman 2:03 Yeah. Christine Garrington 2:03 And it was actually there where I was given a free rein to try to help that institute promote its research better to communicate and engage around its research better with non-academic audiences to wider audiences, that I came up with this idea of using my skills, my background in this new setting, in the university and research setting to launch a podcast and it was indeed there that I launched my very first podcast, and that would have been in around I think, 2010 - 2011. Todd Landman 2:34 Wow. So 12 years ago. Now, I wanted to just hone in on one thing you said there, you've talked about people telling their stories. And I want to link it to my next question, which is, at what point did you want to work with academics interested in presenting their own podcasts? But I guess, are they any good at telling their stories? And did you really have to coach them to tell their stories? Because sometimes people ask us questions, we give ridiculously complex answers. And people really want more straightforward answers to questions, maybe in a more binary fashion. So how do you get academics interested in presenting their own podcasts? And how do you get actually get academics to sit and talk in a way that is meaningful, interesting and productive for a non-academic audience? Christine Garrington 3:14 Yeah, I think I'd go back a little bit and say that when I produced my first podcast, that was me in the chair, that was me, Chris Garrington, journalist, interviewer, you know, trying to coax good answers out of researchers and working with them on that in a way where they could present their work accessibly by asking questions, if you like that we're not about necessarily the complexities behind the research in terms of the methods and the regressions of the variables and all the things that a lot of researchers want to talk about, particularly social scientists, and work with them to really think about how they could answer simple questions about the meaning of their research, or how it could benefit people in the real world, how it could be of help to policymakers and practitioners. So if you'd like I was already working with them in that way in that environment. But moving on to your sort of question. I had this thing in the back of my mind, which was that, ...
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    30 mins
  • Human rights in a digital world: pause for thought

    Human rights in a digital world: pause for thought
    Jul 22 2022
    In Episode 9 of Series 7, Todd is joined again by Ben Lucas, Director of 3DI at the University of Nottingham, funders of this series. Together they reflect on some of the key themes and ideas to emerge from Series 7 of The Rights Track about human rights in a digital world. Transcript Todd Landman 0:01 Welcome to The Rights Track podcast, which gets the hard facts about the human rights challenges facing us today. In series seven, we've been discussing human rights in a digital world. I'm Todd Landman. And in the last episode of this fantastic series, I'm delighted to be joined for the second time by Ben Lucas, Managing Director of 3DI at the University of Nottingham, a hub for world class data science research and funders for this series of our podcast. Ben helped kick off series seven at the end of last year talking about some of the challenges and opportunities created in a data driven society and the implications for our human rights. Today, he's here to help us reflect on some of the key themes that have emerged from this series. So welcome, Ben, it's great to have you on this final episode of The Rights Track. Ben Lucas 0:46 Great to be here. Thanks very much. Todd Landman 0:48 So last night, we were at a launch event for INFINITY, which is an inclusive financial technology hub being launched here at the University of Nottingham, we had a bucolic setting at the Trent bridge, cricket ground, which I say was quite historic. But some of the messages I heard coming out of that event last night, really gave me hope for the promise of digital with respect, particularly to helping people who are currently excluded from financial technologies or finance more generally. And the ever, you know, sort of problem of people getting credit ratings getting access to finance, I wondered if you could just reflect on what was shared last night around the the positive story that could be told around using technology to give people access to hard to find finance? Ben Lucas 1:29 Yeah, absolutely. So I think the central issue with financial inaccessibility is really the fact that people get trapped in this really bad cycle, and perhaps don't have savings, and then you lean more on credit options, for example. And then you become more and more dependent, if you like on credit options. Equally, there are also folks who are excluded from accessing credit completely or at an affordable rate. In the first instance, which obviously changes very much the quality of life, let's say that they're able to enjoy the things they're able to purchase, and so on. So really, the mission of projects like INFINITY, which is focusing very much on this idea of inclusive financial technology, is trying to boost accessibility to everything from tools that help people save to tools that help people spend to a breaking that some of these negative cycles that cause people to end up in not so great financial situations. And yeah, it's really leveraging and learning from, you know, all the wonderful developments in, you know, things like analytics and new financial services, products, especially those that are app based, that we use in the rest of the financial services world, but applying them for good, basically, so very much consistent with this data for good message that we've been speaking about in this series. Todd Landman 2:51 Right that's really interesting. So it's a data driven approach to understanding the gaps and inequalities in a modern society that does have the data infrastructure and technological infrastructure to give people access. But really the data driven approach lowers the barriers to entry for those folks. And I was quite struck by that there was a colleague there from Experian, which is a credit rating agency talking about the millions of people who either don't have online bank accounts don't have access to the right kinds of technologies, and don't have the kind of credit rating that gives them access to the lower priced financial products out there, which in sort of ordinary terms means they're paying a much higher interest rate to borrow money than people that do have a credit rating. So one solution was to use data analytics and a data driven approach to understand their position to boost their credit rating in a way that would give them access to cheaper finance. Did I get that right? Ben Lucas 3:40 Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, the central thing in financial services and lending is obviously managing their risk exposure with any individual consumer, but then also across, you know, their entire consumer portfolio. And I think, you know, one of the big opportunities in the inclusive FinTech space slash probably what we're going to see going forward is credit rating agencies and credit rating support products, looking for other variables or indicators that, you know, can really paint a clearer picture of individual consumers, and perhaps even say, well, actually, there's not so...
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    26 mins
  • Eyewitness: using digital technology to prosecute human rights abusers

    Eyewitness: using digital technology to prosecute human rights abusers
    Jun 28 2022
    In Episode 8 of Series 7 of The Rights Track, Todd is in conversation with Wendy Betts, Director of eyeWitness, an International Bar Association project launched in 2015 which collects verifiable video of human rights violations for use in investigations and trials. We're asking Wendy how the use of digital technology can help to hold accountable those who commit human rights crimes. Transcript Todd Landman 0:01 Welcome to The Rights Track podcast, which gets the hard facts about the human rights challenges facing us today. In series seven, we're discussing human rights in a digital world. I'm Todd Landman, in this episode, I'm delighted to be joined by Wendy Betts. Wendy is director of eyeWitness an International Bar Association project launched in 2015, which collects verifiable video of human rights violations for use in investigations and trials. So today we're asking Wendy, how does the use of digital technology help to hold accountable those who commit human rights crimes? So Wendy, it's absolutely brilliant to have you on this episode of the right track. So welcome. Wendy Betts 0:38 Thanks, Todd. It's great to be here. Todd Landman 0:40 You and I met in Bergen in Norway, we were at the Rafto Foundation awards for the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and Human Rights Data Analysis Group have featured in previous episodes on The Rights Track. And I see there is a kind of correlation, if you will, between the work of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group and the work that you do at eyeWitness. It is just that the data you're collecting is really video files and video footage. So tell us a little bit about the work that you're doing with eyeWitness. Wendy Betts 1:08 Absolutely. So at eyeWitness, we are helping human rights defenders in conflict zones and other places that are experiencing large scale human rights violations, to collect photo and video information in a way that makes it easier to authenticate. So that footage can be used in investigations and trials. So we work with human rights defenders in three ways. First, we're providing a mobile camera app that we designed to help ensure that the footage can be easily authenticated. And then we are helping to securely store that footage and maintain the chain of custody so it can eventually be used in investigations and trials. And third, we work to then take a working copy of that footage that we catalogue and tag to make it easier for investigators to identify footage that's potentially of interest to their investigations and incorporate that into those processes. Todd Landman 2:01 Well, that's a great summary of the work that you do. I recall when I was a student at Georgetown University, I worked in the Lauinger Library. And my job was to produce photographs in the pre-digital age. So this was processing rolls of film in the old cans used to kind of shake them with the chemicals and then use an enlarger and make photographs. And that was fine for special collections and photographing books. But one day, a Jesuit priest came into the library and handed me a roll of film and said I need 10 copies of each of these pictures. And they were actually photographs from the crime scene where Jesuit priests had been murdered in El Salvador. And I'm curious that when we enlarge those pictures and submitted them back to the authorities that requested them, is that kind of evidence still considered verifiable evidence? And what is it that the digital elements all of this adds to the veracity and the verifiability of evidence collected on human rights crimes? Wendy Betts 2:58 There's a long history of photo and video being used as evidence, that photo and video in its hard copy form would need to be verified to go to court. So generally speaking, the court would want to speak with the photographer, or in the absence of photographer, somebody that could help explain that that footage is indeed an accurate portrayal of that location at that time. And what digital technology has done is expand the ability of who can be the photographer to collect that potential evidence. So with the two trends of smartphones in everyone's pocket, plus the rise of social media platforms where people can share this information, you're suddenly seeing this massive proliferation of the amount of available information that could be used as evidence. But indeed, this also will need to be verified in much the same way. But the challenges to doing that are slightly different. And then the technology that we can bring to bear to do that is slightly different. Todd Landman 3:52 Yes, I understand those differences. And so there's a lot of debate today, if we take the War in Ukraine as a good example, when it first started, there was a flurry of activity on Twitter that said, don't believe everything you see on Twitter. So there of course will be manipulated images manipulated video, I see manipulated video every day, some of it you can tell straight ...
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    29 mins
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