Digital Humanitarianism

The DALOSS research project organizes a workshop featuring Fleur Johns, Professor, Dean, and Head of Sydney Law School.

Fleur Johns is a leading voice in legal theory. She works at the intersections of international law, law & development, and law & technology, and she employs a distinctly interdisciplinary approach that draws on cultural and social theories from the humanities and social sciences.

During the workshop, Fleur Johns will present her latest book, #Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order (Oxford University Press, 2023), on digital humanitarianism and its profound implications for international law, politics and digital cultures. Specifically, her groundbreaking book analyses how populations, maps, and emergencies take shape on the global plane in digital form through an innovative interdisciplinary methodology centered on analysis of interfaces.

At the workshop, we will put the insights offered by Johns’s book into dialogue with broader discussions in critical data and machine learning studies on issues such as data justice, data colonialism and cloud ethics as well as emerging topics such as synthetic data, deep learning methods and cloud infrastructures. Furthermore, we will discuss the opportunities and challenges of interdisciplinary collaborations and work across humanities, social sciences, and law.

We are pleased to provide workshop participants with the introduction and a chapter of her book in advance.

Dr. Amir Anwar (Edinburgh University) will act as discussant.

About the speaker

Fleur Johns is Professor in the Faculty of Law & Justice and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at UNSW Sydney working in international law, legal theory, and law and technology. She is also, in 2021-2024, Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Fleur has published five books the most recent of which is #Help: Digital Humanitarianism and the Remaking of International Order (Oxford University Press, 2023). She has a further book forthcoming with Cambridge University Press, co-edited with Gavin Sullivan and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche, entitled Global Governance by Data: Infrastructures of Algorithmic Rule. She serves on a range of journal editorial boards including those of the American Journal of International Law and the journals Science, Technology & Human Values, the Journal of Cross-disciplinary Research in Computational Law, and Technology and Regulation, and is a Fellow and Executive Council member of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.

Please sign-up with Louis Ravn at by 14 April at the latest. Kindly note that seating is limited. We encourage early career scholars to attend.

We look forward to welcoming you. Coffee, tea, and cake will be served.