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Dr

Jayson Lamchek

Casual Research Fellow

Faculty of Business and Law/Deakin Law School/Deakin Cyber Research and Innovation Centre

Orcid identifier0000-0003-1292-4334
  • Casual Research Fellow
    Faculty of Business and Law/Deakin Law School/Deakin Cyber Research and Innovation Centre
  • +61 3 924 68031 (Work)
  • Melbourne Burwood Campus, 221 Burwood Highway, Burwood, Victoria 3125

BIO

My interdisciplinary human rights scholarship has encompassed the study of human rights across their legal, political, international, and historical contexts. It’s understatement to say that a lot’s changed in the 75 years since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was proclaimed, but while the technologies that shape our lives expand exponentially in scope and power, mainstream human rights scholarship has remained tethered to the civil and the political, to formalism over innovation.

I started on my current path during my PhD studies on the intersection between human rights and counterterrorism, in which I found that the language of human rights constricted more than aided on-the-ground activists struggling with the new machinery of counterterrorism. Were human rights becoming anachronistic? Or are they capacious and flexible enough to hold their power in a vastly different-looking universe?

To respond to these questions, I’ve plunged into the brave new cyberworld we inhabit, investigating the legal and ethical aspects of cybersecurity research and technology development, as well as the legal and ethical dimensions of cyber-mediated social change. The overarching question within each strand of my research is: can human rights law be mobilised to counter challenges arising from new technologies, and how?

In the My Research tab, I explain some of the law and tech-related projects I’ve been working on and which I plan to build upon over the next five years. They have shaped my understanding of the challenges technology poses to human rights, as well my thinking that the likely solutions to these challenges will involve human rights advocates engaging with these technologies directly, at various levels. By way of example, I was part of an interdisciplinary team (led by UNSW, funded by the ARC) that examined a digital tool produced by the World Food Program and the Chinese AI company Ali Baba to assist the UN humanitarian agency in making resource-allocation decisions. We pioneered a way of combining socio-legal, historical, computer science and statistical expertise to ‘closely read’ and ‘deconstruct’ a digital decision-making tool (in this case the digital platform ‘Hunger Map Live’) so that people can query the possibly problematic assumptions and likely consequences of using the tool for different sets of users. We conceived of our work as an illustration of how lawyers might collaborate with their tech colleagues to contribute to ‘digital literacy’. Given the proliferation of predictive/generative technological tools in all areas of decision-making, it is possible that in the near future law students will be trained not only to analyse legal decisions but also how technologies employed in decision-making of all sorts affect those decisions.

In my ongoing work in international law, I investigate Third World movement-inspired international law principles with radical redistributive intent, particularly the right to benefit from scientific progress. One strand of my work involves investigating potential benefit-sharing in Big Data and, further, relating these insights to developments in medicine, food production, and mining in the deep sea and outer space.

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY CURRENT APPOINTMENT

  • Casual Research Fellow
    Deakin University, Deakin Law School

ACADEMIC POSITIONS

  • Research Fellow (ARC Digital Humanitarianism Project)
    UNSW Sydney, Faculty of Law and Justice, Sydney, AustraliaMay 2021 - Dec 2021
  • Postdoctoral Fellow
    National University of Singapore, Faculty of Law, Singapore, SingaporeAug 2017 - Jul 2019
  • Adjunct Associate Professor
    University of New England, Armidale, Australia2021 - present
  • Visiting Research Fellow
    Australian National University, College of Law, Canberra, AustraliaJan 2020 - Dec 2021
  • Senior Lecturer
    University of the Philippines Manila, College of Law, Manila, Philippines1999 - 2006

NON-ACADEMIC POSITIONS

  • Human Rights Lawyer
    Public Interest Law Center, Manila, Philippines1999 - 2004
  • Research and Policy Development Lawyer
    Legal Rights and Natural Resources Center, Quezon City, Philippines2006 - 2008

DEGREES

  • Doctor of Philosophy
    Australian National University
  • M.A. in Human Rights Practice (Erasmus Mundus) (Distinction)
    Erasmus MC, Rotterdam, Netherlands2009 - 2011
  • MA in Public Administration (Peace and Conflict Studies concentration)
    International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan2006 - 2008
  • Bachelor of Laws (LLB)
    University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines1993 - 1998
  • Bachelor of Arts (Philosophy)
    University of the Philippines Diliman, Quezon City, Philippines1989 - 1993

FIELDS OF RESEARCH (2020)

  • Law in context
  • International and comparative law
  • Political science
  • Legal systems
  • Public law

AREA/FACULTY

  • Faculty of Business and Law

DEPARTMENT/SCHOOL/INSTITUTE

  • Deakin Law School

STRATEGIC RESEARCH AND INNOVATION CENTRE

  • Deakin Cyber Research and Innovation Centre

RESEARCH STRENGTHS