Sara Davis
Sara (Meg) Davis (Professor)
Academic profile
I joined CIM in June 2023, having launched the Digital Health and Rights Project at the Global Health Centre, Geneva Graduate Institute. Prior to that, I was a research fellow at New York University’s Centre for Human Rights and Global Justice, and a visiting fellow at Fordham University School of Law and Columbia University. I served as the first senior advisor on human rights at the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria, where I led work to institutionalise human rights into their grant agreements in over 120 countries, and drew on this work to inform a book, The Uncounted: Politics of data in global health. I was founding executive director of Asia Catalyst, and a researcher at Human Rights Watch. I earned my MA and Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania and held postdoctoral fellowships at Yale University and UCLA. My early work in Yunnan, China, is discussed in my first book, Song and Silence: Ethnic revival on China's southwest borders. I sit on several advisory groups, including the World Health Organization (WHO) Expert Group on Ethics and Governance of AI. In 2017, I was one of three winners of the International Geneva Award.
Research
My current research explores the future of human rights and gender equality in the digital age, through an international collaboration with researchers, lawyers, and civil society groups. In particular, I’m interested in how power inequalities shape digital access, data, algorithms, and governance. I focus on structural power imbalances among countries (data colonialism), languages, genders (digital gender divides), and how these and other inequalities intersect to shape knowledge and visibility.
Through transnational participatory approaches to research, I aim to explore new approaches to community mobilization and knowledge production, and to rethink and apply human rights and feminist intersectional principles in new ways. As an anthropologist, I favour experience-near ethnographic research methods, sometimes complemented by legal, policy or data analysis.
My research interests include technology and human rights, politics of data and indicators, human rights in global governance, civil society, and prevention and response to gendered violence. My past research has included work in China, Grenada, Kenya, and Thailand, among other places.
Areas of Interest: Human Rights, Participation
Teaching
At CIM, I teach IM961: Global Digital Health and Human Rights.
Contact details
Email:
Sara.Davis@warwick.ac.uk
Mailing address:
Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies
Room B0.24
University of Warwick
Coventry
CV4 7AL