Mental Health, Post-Secondary Education, and Information Communications Technology

The primary aim of this chapter is to explore the use of information and communications technology (ICT) in post-secondary education to provide opportunities for students with mental health difficulties to remain engaged in their studies during times of mental illness. Higher incompletion rates are particularly concerning amongst this group. The authors discuss how improved outcomes can be achieved through effective use of ICT. This is particularly important from a human rights perspective so that people diagnosed with mental illness are afforded the same opportunities as other members of the community. Strategies afforded by ICT tools that are essential for supporting students with mental illness to optimise their chances of success in their post-secondary education outcomes are outlined. The authors combine mental health and human-computer interaction (HCI) to argue for the need to design appropriate instructional ICT strategies to support students experiencing mental illness to remain engaged with their studies. ICT has evolved with powerful and unique features, offering special applications such as educational software, eCommerce, and healthcare. Yet, very little is being said about how to streamline these applications as effective HCI environments to enhance mental health and wellbeing. The chapter explores the positive and negative impact of ICT tools on teaching and learning. In considering mental health and post-secondary education, it focuses on human rights issues of access and equity, disclosure, and stigma. Authors suggest that ICT can enable students to remain engaged with their learning in general, while at the same time promote a deep sense of community.

ICT and Human Rights in Brazil

Since the end of military government in Brazil, civilian governments have sought the accumulation and exercise of power to the detriment of the citizenry. They have done this with a kind of totalitarianism that takes the form of digital or bureaucratic dictatorship. Since the 1990s, they have started to implement information technology in the public sector to regulate and run the country in a command-and-control way through technological or bureaucratic dictatorship rather democratic process. While it is evident that there is a high level of investment in information technology in the public sector (e-government) in Brazil, there are also clear signs of the violation of human rights in terms of privacy. These occur, for instance, when the public administration exercises the power to engage in a process of electronic surveillance without the supervision of the judiciary. It is alleged that thousands of individual files have been accessed in the public administration in Brazil, despite the privacy protection offered by the national constitution. In addition, there is a proliferation of biometric identification using faces, eyes, fingerprints, and other body parts, especially in the e-voting system. This chapter shows how information technology (e-government) in Brazil could lead to violations of human rights because of the proliferation of biometric identification in the e-voting system as well as other sorts of invisible electronic surveillance that are affecting civil liberties and individual rights, including privacy.

Truth-Seeking at a Distance

The Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (LTRC) was established by the Liberian government in 2005 to “promote national peace, security, unity, and reconciliation.” The LTRC thought it essential to allow Liberians who had fled the conflict to participate in the truth and reconciliation process. As a result, it partnered with a US-based non-governmental organization, The Advocates for Human Rights, to conduct the Diaspora Project. This chapter provides an overview of the Diaspora Project, which enabled Liberians on three continents to give statements to the LTRC. Given the wide dispersion of the Liberian diaspora, the author of this chapter demonstrates how information communication technologies were essential in the success of the Diaspora Project.

“In YouTube We Trust”

YouTube has enabled new forms of political dissent in Arab societies. This chapter examines the development and rise of YouTube in the Arab world. In particular, it looks at how this video exchange site is invigorating the online public sphere’s vigorous demand for political reform and respect for human rights. Specifically, this investigation explores how social networking capabilities have made YouTube an effective asset in dissidents’ arsenal among Arab activists. To examine the vibrancy of this fledgling online public sphere, the chapter scrutinizes how activists incorporated YouTube videos to shed light on human rights abuses, specifically police abuse, corruption, and brutality in two Arab countries, Egypt and Morocco. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the new campaigning modes that the Internet and YouTube have facilitated.

ICT Policies Favouring Human Rights

The tremendous developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs) over the last 20 years have substantially changed communication practices across the world. The Internet and mobile phones help to open new horizons for connections between people, leading to a global network for the sharing of information and ideas. In this new environment, human rights need to have a place, and traditional notions related to mass media need to be adapted to the needs of civil society. Freedom of expression has become much more individualistic, with information exchanges no longer relying on the traditional intermediaries (mass media) but on the exchange of ideas on social networking and other platforms. Civil society participation in the information world requires the necessary infrastructure however. And since states have an obligation to see to it that human rights are realized in practice, this may mean the facilitation of private investments to improve the ICT infrastructure. In this context, ICT policies favoring human rights must encompass a right to development.

ICTs and Gender-Based Rights

In this new age, the Internet, the network of networks connected by a complex array of electronic, wireless, and optical technologies extending from the private to the public sector, and from academic to business and governmental organizations, is starting to have increasingly broad social implications, besides the technical ones. Nevertheless, as women and men enter and progress differently into employment and occupations, not all humankind benefits equally from information and communication technologies (ICTs). The question that this chapter addresses is whether women have equal rights and opportunities to access and use ICTs. In this chapter, the author aims to strengthen the idea that in this changing era, new ICTs represent a cardinal instrument for social transformation, enabling and empowering women to become controllers of information.

Social Assistance via the Internet

This chapter examines the connection between social assistance and the use of information communication technologies to gain access to social rights as human rights. The research is based on data consisting of 594 online questions and answers related to social assistance. Of these, 160 analysis units were chosen for a detailed content analysis. The aim of the study was to determine what different positions and combinations of positions officials and service users found themselves in during online social service consultation and how service provision was affected by an official’s educational background and the phase of the social assistance process that was in progress. The results show that there are several possible combinations of outcomes and that the educational background of an answering official, as well as the phase of the process for which answers are given, have an impact on the service received.

Human Rights Defenders and the Right to Digital Privacy and Security

Digital technologies, such as mobile phones and the internet, provide new opportunities for Human Rights Defenders to mobilise people, coordinate activities, uncover and document abuses, publish findings, and engage new audiences. However, with these new opportunities come new risks as well. This chapter examines the right to and need for private digital communication as part of freedom of expression in the context of carrying out human rights work. Drawing on their experiences at Tactical Technology Collective, an international non-government organisation, the authors argue that the most effective means to address the digital privacy needs of people who are defending human rights is to provide a range of support - including awareness raising media, how-to toolkits, and hands-on training - that assist Human Rights Defenders to identify and then address digital risks by changing behaviours in ways most appropriate to their local context.

Counting the Unknown Victims of Political Violence

The Benetech Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG) (http://www.hrdag.org/) analyzes the patterns and magnitude of large-scale human rights violations. Together with local partners, HRDAG collects and preserves human rights data and helps NGOs and other human rights organizations accurately interpret quantitative findings. HRDAG statisticians, programmers, and data analysts develop methodologies to determine how many of those killed and disappeared have never been accounted for - and who is most responsible. This account illustrates how HRDAG pioneered the calculation of scientifically sound statistics about political violence from multiple data sources including the testimony of witnesses who come forward to tell their stories. It describes methodologies that HRDAG analysts have developed to ensure that statistical human rights claims are transparently, demonstrably, and undeniably true.

Contingency and Hybridity in the Study of Digital Advocacy Networks

This chapter proposes an analytic approach for the study of ICTs in contentious politics and human rights advocacy. By applying the analytical frames of contingency and hybridity to study design, this approach aims to promote empirical analyses, strengthen data comparability, and improve understanding into how human rights activists strategically combine digital and grounded communications to respond to complex and changing environments. The authors explore this analytic approach and its implications through a close analysis of the Front to Defend Egyptian Protesters (FDEP), a Cairo-based initiative utilizing multiple digital media to mobilize support teams for arrested protesters and work towards their release. Applying the analytical frames of contingency and hybridity to FDEP activities in 2010, prior to the uprisings now commonly referred to as the Arab Spring, the chapter observes a number of opportunities for targeted data collection. It closes by observing the challenges and opportunities this poses to the contemporary study of digital activism.