Prof. Patricia J. Williams, eredoctor van de Faculteit Rechten 2022, reist aan het einde van juni 2022 naar België. De Faculteit organiseert een exclusief invite-only event op dinsdag 28 juni 2022.

The Regulation of Hubris: At the Intersection of Techno-Optimism and Political Pessimism?

The 21st century’s sudden Promethean power enabling us to hear all, to see all and to manipulate both social and biological life has been enabled by a disinhibited techno-optimism. From CCTV to Meta to CRISPR, recent technologies have coalesced into powerful forms of both legal and extra-legal policing and surveillance infrastructures.

In concert with political pessimism about global futures—i.e., migration, culture wars, reactionary “replacement” theories—these mechanisms of oversight are increasingly deployed in pursuit of totalistic guarantees of future outcomes. The presumption of innocence upon which law and liberal democracy relies is threatened by comprehensive predictive risk profiling. These new assessment tools are also fueled by market metrics and profit motive, thus reinscribing old divisions based on race, ethnicity, sex, nationality and religion; they do so by giving new value to old forms of tracking, bounty-hunting and human commodification. This reflection will consider the urgent necessity for collective governance of such broad public-private, techno-legal entanglements, and for greater recognition of the infinitely complex ethical dilemmas at stake. 

Programma

17.30 uur Welkom

18.00 uur Welkom en introductie, door decaan prof. dr. Frederik Swennen en prof. dr. Esther van Zimmeren

18.15 uur The Regulation of Hubris: At the Intersection of Techno-Optimism and Political Pessimism? door prof. Patricia J. Williams (doctor honoris causa UAntwerpen 2022)

19.00 uur Overhandiging van het epitoga en het eredoctoraat aan prof. Patricia J. Williams, door rector prof. dr. Herman Van Goethem

19.15 uur Walking dinner

22.00 uur Einde