Human dignity, democracy and AI
Research
My work sits where political theory, philosophy of law and the history of political thought meet. Three questions run through it: what human dignity has meant, and can still mean, as a practice of resistance; how democracy can survive algorithmic government; and how health and life are governed.
Current projects (2024-2026)
White Paper on Artificial Intelligence and Digital Rights. Commissioned by Red.es, the Spanish public entity for digital transformation, and led from Carlos III University of Madrid (2024-2026). I co-coordinate it with José Vida Fernández: a set of proposals on the rights at stake in new digital environments, from health data to generative AI.
A rights-based impact assessment for AI in health. With colleagues from PUC-Rio and Carlos III, a proposal to re-orient the EU Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment around patients’ claims rather than providers’ compliance (AI and Ethics, 2026).
The limits of human oversight. With Pedro Borges, an analysis of how “trustworthy AI” shifts moral responsibility onto the humans who supervise automated decision systems (Oxford Intersections: AI in Society, 2026).
Work in progress. Several journal articles currently under peer review (titles withheld to preserve anonymous review).
Research group
Caring for our Common Future, led since 2018 with Katharina Bauer (Erasmus University Rotterdam) and Stephen Riley (University of Leicester). Two edited special issues, Human Dignity (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society 88, 2022) and The Different Lives of a Pandemic (Law, Culture and the Humanities 21(1), 2025), and the concept of Biodignity, a way to think human rights together with the rights of animals and nature.
Earlier projects
HuDig19, Making Humans: Human Dignity in Nineteenth-Century France (2021-2023). Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action, hosted by EHESS/IRIS in Paris in partnership with the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought. Project page on CORDIS.
AI-free sanctuaries (2023). A public proposal for spaces where no algorithm mediates what we see, decide or say, published in The Conversation in English, French and Portuguese and discussed on Radio Télévision Suisse. See Public Outreach.