Human Dignity and the Calculus of Human Worth with Speaker Margarita Boenig-Liptsin

Margarita (Margo) Boenig-Liptsin is a Sorbonne Université - Paris IAS Chair on "Major Change," a fellowship at the Institut d'Études Avancées (IEA) in Paris. Prior to the fellowship at the IEA, she was the Director of the Human Contexts and Ethics Program in the Division of Computing, Data Science, and Society at the University of California Berkeley and Lecturer in the History Department. She teaches about the relationship between technology, power, democracy, and ethics with a foundation in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) to students in both technical and social science/humanities fields. At Berkeley, she led a team that developed the Human Contexts and Ethics (HCE) component of the data science educational program. This work includes translating social science theory and methods for students of all backgrounds, building connections between engineering and social sciences, bringing together faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates at Berkeley into a community of scholars focused on issues of technology and society, and connecting the work of HCE to the San Francisco Bay Area's communities and needs. Margarita Boenig-Liptsin is trained in the field of Science, Technology and Society and holds a PhD in History of Science (Harvard University) and in Philosophy (Université Paris 1 - Sorbonne). Her research examines transformations to human identity, citizenship, and ethics in relation to information technologies across time and cultures.