First ILS Lunch Seminar of 2020 with Hoko Horii and Lexo Zardiashvili
The monthly ILS Lunch Seminars have slowly developed into somewhat of a tradition. During this seminar series, all researchers from Leiden Law School can present their research and apprehend in a comfortable setting what researchers from other research programs and institutes are working on. On Thursday 16 January 2020, a new edition of the ILS Lunch Seminars takes place. This month, Hoko Horii and Lexo Zardiashvili will present their current research.
Hoko Horii has been a PhD candidate at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and the Van Vollenhoven Institute since March 2016. During this ILS Lunch Seminar, she will give a presentation on “Rethinking ‘agency’ in international human rights”. Over the past decade, ‘child marriage’, defined as “any formal marriage or informal union where one or both of the parties are under 18 years of age”, has become increasingly invested in the international human rights and development agenda. International conventions such as CEDAW and CRC have prohibited child marriage, and transnational organizations such as UNICEF and Girls Not Brides started various programs to “End Child Marriage”. Within this framework, there is a puzzle of agency: while international human rights institutions celebrate when girls exercise their agency not to marry, they do not recognize their agency to marry. In order to re-examine, reflect and discuss the international approach to agency, Hoko’s presentation offers a socio-legal analysis of child marriage, based on findings from her fieldwork in Indonesia.
The second presentation will be given by Lexo Zardiashvili, PhD candidate at Leiden Law School, where he also obtained his Master of Laws degree and has worked as a researcher since fall 2018. Lexo received his first degree in Law from Caucasus University in Georgia, where he also worked for the central bank. Lexo will give a presentation on “Artificial Dignity - Regulating Manipulative Capabilities of Artificial Intelligence for Human Dignity”. Contemporary Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools ‘have the growing capacity not only to predict choices but also to influence emotions and thoughts and alter an anticipated course of action, sometimes subliminally.’ Pressuring the cognitive autonomy of individuals and their ability to independently form opinions or take decisions clashes against the fundamental belief in dignity of all humans as independent moral agents. During his presentation, Lexo will discuss how he and his co-workers intend to approach research for regulating manipulative capabilities of AI, to maintain coherence with inviolable value of ‘human dignity’.
This ILS Lunch Seminar takes place on Thursday 16 January 2020 from 13:00 – 14:00 hrs in KOG B0.13. Lunch is provided at the monthly seminars and there is no need to register, just join! Please contact the ILS student-assistant to sign up as a speaker at an ILS lunch seminar or visit our website for more news on ILS 2.0.