The De|Center is an interdisciplinary center for community-based research, corporate accountability, and technology design interventions that works to reduce the mass-scale harms of existing and emerging technologies.
Meet the De|Center team
Afsaneh Rigot
Founder and Principal Researcher
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Afsaneh Rigot's (she/her) work has focused on law, human rights, and technology with a focus on highly marginalized populations, as well as general privacy and security topics. As a researcher and facilitator, she addresses the negative effects of technology in contexts it was not designed for and the effects of western-centrism on marginalized and criminalized communities. She has years of experience in pushing for corporate accountability, and tech changes with powerful tech companies, highlighting the need for effective corporate accountability, harm reduction, and community-centered research through her work on Design from the Margins.
She has written the principal works behind the De|Center, including the Design From the Margins methodology, and led landmark research affecting the tech and human rights community.
Afsaneh previously worked with ARTICLE 19 as a Senior Researcher on human rights issues with a focus on LGBTQ rights and corporate responsibility in MENA. She is an advisor to the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School, Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard, and is on boards and committees of a number of tech and human rights initiatives.
Earlier in her career, as a legal practitioner Afsaneh specialized in environmental protection and worked legal cases for refugee asylum and protection including in immigration detention centers and refugee camps.
As a queer woman from MENA, ex-refugee, a child of a ex-political prisoner, and an activist working under security and pseudonymously, she takes deep learning from the communities she’s part of and owes much to. These communities are also the reason and drive that led to her founding the De|Center.
Jessica Fjeld
Managing Director
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As scholar, advocate, and senior leader, Jessica Fjeld (she/her) focuses on supporting the work of human rights defenders and creatives, especially as it intersects with emerging technology. Her interests include equity and inclusion; freedom of expression; business and human rights; law and the arts; and the governance of artificial intelligence. In addition to her work with the De|Center, Jessica is a senior advisor at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, a lecturer on law at Harvard Law School, and a member of the boards of the Global Network Initiative, the Data Nutrition Project, and the Center for the Study of Technology and Society (CETyS) at Universidad de San Andres.
Bringing deep experience in the tech and human rights world as well as organizational governance and management, Jessica speaks and writes on these issues internationally. She has been an advisor to DFM for years and represented many decentered organizations and communities independently and as part of her previous role as the Assistant Director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard Law School.
Jessica is also a poet, the author of Redwork (BOAAT Press, 2018), and the recipient of a chapbook fellowship from the Poetry Society of America and the 92nd Street Y/Boston Review Discovery Prize.
Roja
Director of Communications
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Roja is a writer, editor, and teacher. She has worked for The New York Times, The Daily Beast, and Al-Monitor, among others. She teaches ESOL and citizenship prep classes at the Brooklyn Public Library. On the longform side, she ghostwrites memoirs, has been an Open City fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop, and a Writer-In-Residence at Hedgebrook.
Advisory Board Members
Azza
Nubi
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Azza Nubi, (she/her/they/them) is a Sudanese American feminist, and LGBTIQ+ Human rights advocate with long and deep experience in security and digital rights, community building, and organizing, advocating, and promoting LGBTIQ+ rights in the SWANA region. Azza commits to building and strengthening the LGBTIQ+ movement in the SWANA region, where she was one of the pioneers who co-founded the queer movement and many organizations in Egypt, Sudan, North Africa, and the MENA region. Since 2015, she has trained several LGBTIQ+ activists in the region and written and published holistic security manuals in Arabic, English, and French.
David
Kaye
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David Kaye, (he/him) is a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, and a 2023-2024 Fulbright Distinguished Scholar in Public International Law at Lund University, Sweden. From 2014 – 2020 he served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression. He is also the author of Speech Police: The Global Struggle to Govern the Internet (2019), Independent Chair of the Board of the Global Network Initiative, and a Trustee of ARTICLE 19. He writes regularly for international and American law journals and media outlets.
Jack
Harrison-Quintana
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Jack Harrison-Quintana, (he/him) is a queer Latino activist, author, researcher, and corporate change strategist. His work at the intersection of digital advocacy and LGBTQ justice has earned him recognition as one of Foreign Policy magazine’s top geopolitical thinkers of 2016 as well as Fast Company’s most creative people in business.
Over the course of his career, Jack has worked with the National LGBTQ Task Force, the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE), the Global Trans Research and Advocacy Project (GTRAP), Grindr for Equality, and Khemara, as well as five state and local LGBTQ-related ballot measure campaigns.
Jack has spoken in over a quarter of the world's countries. He has presented to the National HIV Prevention Conference, International AIDS Conference, ILGA World, and Creating Change. He's also briefed the US House of Representatives; the US Senate; the United Nations; and members of the British Parliament, the Norwegian Stortinget, and the Hong Kong Legislative Council.
Mehwish
Ansari
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Mehwish Ansari,(she/her) is a program officer with the Ford Foundation’s Technology and Society program.
Previously, Mehwish was head of digital at ARTICLE 19. There, she led the Global Digital Program, which works to protect and promote the consideration of human rights in internet infrastructure technologies. Prior to joining ARTICLE 19, she worked with the Speech, Privacy & Technology Project and the Human Rights Program at the American Civil Liberties Union.
Mehwish has served as a member of the Advisory Network of the Freedom Online Coalition and the 2023 nominations committee of the Internet Society. Over the course of her career, she has served as lead negotiator for human rights issues on behalf of the United Kingdom and the European region on treaty-level resolutions at the International Telecommunication Union and delivered expert testimony to the United Kingdom House of Lords Select Committee on Communications and Digital. Her work has been highlighted at SXSW, cited in The Financial Times, and published in the 2023 book Eaten by the Internet by Meatspace Press.
Nathan
Freitas
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Nathan Freitas, (he/him) is the founder and director of Guardian Project, an award-winning, open-source, mobile security collaborative with millions of users and beneficiaries worldwide. Their most well known app is Orbot, which brings the Tor anonymity and circumvention network to Android devices, and has been installed more than 20 million times.
His work on off-grid, decentralized, secure mobile communication networks, dubbed Wind, was originally imagined and workshopped while a fellow at the Berkman-Klein Center at Harvard in 2015. In 2018, Wind was selected as a finalist in the Mozilla-National Science Foundation "Wireless Innovation for a Networked Society (WINS)" Challenges.
Guardian Project has worked with WITNESS, the leading human rights media organization, for nearly 15 years on the idea of Smart Cameras solutions that use enhanced metadata, digital signing and notaries, and advanced verification tools to combat mis and dis-information. This work is now realized through ProofMode.org applications and services, and the emerging Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) standard providing publishers, creators, and consumers the ability to trace the origin of different types of media.
Paola
Ricaurte
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Paola Ricaurte, (she/her) is professor in the Department of Media and Digital Culture at Tecnológico de Monterrey and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Alongside Nick Couldry and Ulises Mejias, she co-founded Tierra Común, a network of academics, practitioners and activists interested in decolonizing data. She is a member of the <A+> Alliance for Inclusive Algorithms and leads the Latin American and Caribbean hub of the Feminist AI Research Network, f<A+i>r. In addition to her academic work, she participates in civil society initiatives to promote digital rights, the development of public interest technologies, and the dissemination of the ecosocial impacts of technological development.
Guardrail Advisors
The decentered communities we work with are the experts that direct the changes we advocate for. We know without the right implementation guardrails, tech changes can cause more harm than good.
Guardrail Advisors are a unique set of advisors who provide guardrails for accurate implementations of these changes to ensure they are privacy, equity, security, and justice informed.
Abadir
Ibrahim
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Abadir Ibrahim, (he/him) is an international human rights lawyer and advocate. He is the Associate Director of the Human Rights Program (HRP) at Harvard Law School and previously served as the Head of the Secretariat for the Legal and Justice Affairs Advisory Council of Ethiopia. Dr. Ibrahim’s research agenda focuses on African approaches to human rights and his broader research interests encompass the intersections between global human rights normative structures and non-Western cultural/religious institutions and traditions with an emphasis on normative ethics and religion. See more about Abadir.
Apryl
Williams
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Apryl Williams, (she/her) is an author, advocate, and scholar studying at the intersection of race, gender, and tech. She is Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan and a Faculty Associate at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. For seven years she has been working with black communities, especially on racial equity and discriminatory design while employing the lens of Black feminism. See more about Apryl.
Aymen
Zaghdoudi
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Aymen Zaghdoudi, (he/him) is a professor and freedom of expression advocate. He is a Media law professor at the Institute of Press and Sciences information in Tunis and the MENA Senior Policy Counsel at Access Now. He works with CSOs, journalists and media outlets in the MENA region particularly on media and social media regulation, hate speech and safety of journalists, especially in his home country of Tunisia. See more about Aymen.
Dia
Kayyali
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Dia Kayyali, (they/them) is a member of the Core Committee of the Christchurch Call Advisory Network, a technology and human rights consultant, and a community organizer.
As a leader in the content moderation and platform accountability space, Dia’s work has focused on the real-life impact of policy decisions made by lawmakers and technology companies, with a particular focus on impacts in global majority countries. They have cultivated global solidarity to push back and improve the impact of policies on vulnerable communities, from LGBTQIA+ people to religious minorities.
They have also advocated for human rights extensively directly with policymakers in the United States, European Union, and globally.
They previously served as a Senior Case and Policy Officer at the Oversight Board (aka the Facebook Oversight Board), Policy Director at Mnemonic, the umbrella organization for Syrian Archive, Yemeni Archive, and Sudanese Archive, and Tech + Advocacy Program Manager at WITNESS, and activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Martin
Garcia
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Martin Garcia, (he/him) is a US-based formerly incarcerated individual with lived experience. He is a self-taught journalist and is the manager of News Inside, the print publication of The Marshall Project which is distributed in prisons and jails across the US. Martin is also the Production Assistant on Inside Story – a video series that also goes into prisons and jails around the country. Martin works to provide vital as content to the incarcerated which is often only information that arrives into many prisons, making them news deserts. Some of his work and investigative reporting can be found here.
Mulu K
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Mulu K (he/him) is an Ethiopian legal scholar and practitioner who has worked to represent human rights and international humanitarian law both in Tigray, Ethiopia and internationally in the diaspora. Mulu, holds deep legal and international law expertise and experience but due to his deep understandings, work, and advocacy with some of the most marginalized in the world, with a deep understanding of criminalization and state violence personally.
Kendra
Albert
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Kendra Albert, (they/them) is a technology lawyer, advocate, and scholar of computing, gender, and power. See more about Kendra.
Mahsa
Alimardani
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Mahsa Alimardani, (she/her) is an internet researcher focusing on the Middle East and North Africa region with a specialisation on Iran. She has worked on matters related to human rights, technology, and freedom of expression online for over a decade. She is currently a senior researcher with the international human rights organisations ARTICLE 19. She's also a DPhil candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford, and has previously served as a Senior Information Controls Fellow for the Open Technology Fund at the University of Oxford. See more about Mahsa.
Marwa
Fatafta
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Marwa Fatafta, (she/her) is a Palestinian writer, researcher and policy analyst. She leads Access Now’s policy and advocacy work on digital rights in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. Her work spans a number of issues at the nexus of human rights and technology including content governance and platform accountability, online censorship, digital surveillance, and transnational repression. She has written extensively on the digital occupation in Palestine and focuses on the role of new technologies in armed conflicts and humanitarian contexts and their impact on historically marginalized and oppressed communities. Marwa is a Policy Analyst at Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, an advisory board member of the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, and an advisory committee member for Bread&Net. See more about Marwa.
Norman
Shamas
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Norman Shamas, (they/them) is a security and privacy researcher. They are a privacy architect for a new operating system, a director at Open Privacy, and an advisory council member at OTF. For 10+ years they have been working with queer folx, sex workers, and activists across the globe especially on topics of security and privacy planning and implementation for individuals, organizations, communities, and withing technology.
Salma
Waheedi
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Salma Waheedi, (she/her) is an international law lawyer and advocate with years of experience in international advocacy and submitting to international courts and institutions. She is a Lecturer on Law at Harvard Law School and Executive Director of the Harvard Program on Law and Society in the Muslim World. She works with communities and advocates in the Middle East and North Africa especially on topics of international accountability, gender justice, and prisoners' rights. See more about Salma.
Sarah
Aoun
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Sarah Aoun, (she/her) is a security and privacy researcher and technologist. For the past decade, she has been working with human rights defenders, activists, and journalists on issues of surveillance, hacking, censorship, and cybersecurity. See more about Sarah.
Za’atar
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Za’atar, (she/her) is a Palestinian digital security trainer, working with Citizen Lab and the Tor Project, as well as independently providing hands-on rapid response and digital security support around the world, particularly to highly marginalized communities. She holds deep expertise in all the methods of device extraction and inspection. She infuses this importantly based on her own experiences of detention and knowledge of policing and security forces.
Mutual Aid Fund
We support our communities with no-strings mutual aid, in the form of cash and in-kind assistance. Contact us here for consideration. We encourage companies who have benefitted from DFM to contribute funds.
Vision
Our methodology is called Design from the Margins (DFM), and it produces concrete, meaningful change by focusing on the needs, wants, and experiences of decentered people—that is, those both marginalized and criminalized. This is done through a combination of community-based research, movement lawyering, and harm reduction-focused tech interventions. We push to build with the power informed by those experiences of communities we partner with, are part of and support.
Our vision is to prevent popular tech from being used for policing, surveillance, and carceral punishment of decentered communities, and by proxy all marginalized communities. We do this by embedding harm reduction features and risk mitigations into the tools we all use every day. With these measures in place, the vital technologies that connect us can’t be used as tools to oppress but rather avenues to resist and exist.
We see the work of the De|Center as a part of the movement to challenge mounting harms and the multiple walls of hegemony rising higher: increasing militarization, dictatorial control, digital and physical policing with weaponization of tech for abuses and harms against oppressed and marginalized communities. The De|Center looks to challenge these shifts.
The De|Center is a fiscally sponsored project of Aspiration.
Independence &
Corporate Engagement
We work with decentered communities to prioritize the tools and features most needed for harm reduction to better protect their dignity, safety, security, and privacy. Generally, we make changes to products that are widely used by the community in question and already deployed at scale. For this reason, we find ourselves partnering with some of the largest, most powerful companies on the planet. This is an important part of our work.
We work independently from those companies. Our work is primarily grant-funded, and we only accept corporate donations under specific circumstances to ensure our work’s integrity.
Company donations towards De|Center’s work will need to pass our vetting process and be for general support—the De|Center does not accept any funding from companies for specific research outlined by a company, nor are our findings or priorities influenced by companies we work with. Independence and transparency are among our key values.
Our community groups that partner with the De|Center and our sibling organizations may have their own policies on corporate donations, so long as any collaborative work, research, and outcomes remain in-line with our values.
If companies we have worked with want to support the work of the De|Center and communities, the route that we generally encourage is for them to donate to our community partners directly, or else to our Mutual Aid fund. This fund will be operationally separate from the De|Center, and maintained solely for the purpose of providing assistance to community groups and individuals that we have worked with who are in need.
You can contact us here.
