WITNESS, Author at WITNESS Blog

Behind The Scenes: Visions for Immigrant Justice Our partners at the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network recently released two videos that we are proud to have collaborated on. These videos paint a vision for a more just world for the immigrants and southern border communities in the U.S. that RGV Equal Voice represents and supports. This vision is one that prioritizes […] May 25, 2021
Storytelling Strategies for Immigrant Justice in the U.S. We've compiled examples of videos that illustrate responsible, community-centered and effective storytelling for immigrants' rights. Strategic storytelling can be an antidote to the dehumanization of migrants that stems from the racism and xenophobia embedded in U.S. federal policies, violent enforcement practices, and dominant discourses about immigrants. May 11, 2021
Turn to Video, Not Police In Addressing Anti-Asian Violence Bystander and surveillance footage has helped expose the rising (and undercounted) violence against Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in the U.S. As we contend with the grief and rage spurred by these horrific incidents, we join those seeking answer to the urgent question: How do we keep each other safe? We know that police are […] March 19, 2021
International Women’s Day 2021: Visions of Change How can video and technology fight patriarchy and misogyny? Today, there are more answers to this question than ever before. Feminists have the ability to adapt the wisdoms of historical political struggles to central organizing tools of our time: camera phones, internet, and social media networks. Feminist stories told through video help nuance understandings of […] March 8, 2021
Honoring the 75th Anniversary of Nuremberg On November 29, 1945, only a week into the trial, the . . . prosecution introduced an hour-long film titled ‘The Nazi Concentration Camps.’ When the lights came up in the Palace of Justice all assembled sat in silence. The human impact of this visual evidence was a turning point in the Nuremberg Trial. It […] December 21, 2020
The Role of Video and the Right to Record in Exposing Systemic Racism WITNESS has responded to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’ call for submissions to inform her report on systemic racism and violations of the international human rights of Africans and people of African descent by law enforcement. WITNESS’ submission emphasizes how video has played an essential role in exposing institutional discrimination around the […] December 16, 2020
How Can U.S. Activists Confront Deepfakes and Disinformation? –December 2020 In the US, the 2020 presidential campaign has been called the “misinformation election.” But however significant the results may be, the problem of misinformation is much larger and more persistent than a single event. Recently WITNESS hosted a workshop on deepfakes and visual misinformation for activists and researchers based in the US, where […] December 3, 2020
Making the [In]Visible Powerful: Leveraging Climate Visuals in Courts This article first appeared on Open Global Rights in English and Spanish on October 30, 2020. Climate Change in the Courtroom Human rights researcher Alexa Koenig said, “Visuals are often the bridge between lived experiences on the ground and some of the greatest seats of power,” but that was not what Ashley Funk thought would happen when she received her […] November 13, 2020
Tweet Chat: Archiving For Human Rights For Archives Month 2020, WITNESS Africa hosted a Twitter chat on archiving for the promotion and protection of human rights. In the chat, pertinent questions regarding the importance, practicalities and challenges to human rights archiving were put to Ayanda K of VIDERE and Yvonne Ng of WITNESS. Here is a recap of the chat on […] November 3, 2020
YOUTH V GOV: A Beacon of Hope YOUTH v GOV, a transformative film directed by former WITNESS partner Christi Cooper about the unparalleled work of another former partner, Our Children’s Trust, premieres at the prestigious DOC NYC Film Festival from November 11-19, 2020. Tickets can be purchased here. The next chance to watch this must-see film won’t be until 2021 so don’t […] October 23, 2020
Using Video to Fight Forced Evictions in the U.S. Forced evictions on stolen land during a global pandemic? That’s a reality facing nearly 30-40 million people in the U.S. who can’t pay their rent. Forced evictions have been happening on these lands since colonizers first arrived, terrorizing and displacing Indigenous communities. Today’s eviction crisis is only the latest in generations of compounding crises of […] October 22, 2020
Introducing { Latent Space } – a technology newsletter from WITNESS —August 2020 Technology touches all of our lives, so it touches all of the work we do at WITNESS. But there are some areas of technology more than others that are focal points for our Emerging Threats and Opportunities and Tech + Advocacy programs. We’re in the vanguard of conversations on artificial intelligence and synthetic […] August 17, 2020
WITNESS joins 14 organizations to urge GIFCT to respect human rights WITNESS and 14 other organizations have joined together to send a public letter to the newly appointed Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism (GIFCT) Executive Director Nicholas Rasmussen to apprise him of threats to human rights posed by GIFCT. Many of us have been warning companies and lawmakers about these issues for years. WITNESS is […] July 30, 2020
WITNESS at RightsCon Online 2020 Under the entwined and inflamed injustices that the world is facing (including a pandemic, authoritarianism, corporate exploitation of resources and privacy, racial capitalism, surveillance and the suppression of dissent), it is vital to have spaces that foster innovative resistance. RightsCon has long met this need. This annual gathering centers around the ever-changing role of […] July 22, 2020
Want to Record The Cops? Know Your Rights While not any sort of panacea for police violence, videos of police officers in the US killing unarmed Black men like George Floyd, Oscar Grant and Eric Garner have undeniably been an essential part of the conversation around racist, brutal policing in the United States. Police violence is a much longer lasting pandemic than COVID-19, […] June 18, 2020