Human Rights Minor Ananya Karthik is recipient of 2023-2024 John Gardner Public Service Fellowship

Stanford Human Rights Minor, Ananya Karthik, has been selected as a 2023-24 John Gardner Fellow by the Haas Center for Public Service. As a Computer Science and Political Science major, Ananya is deeply interested in the intersection of human rights, political theory, and ethical technology. As a Gardner Fellow, Ananya will have the opportunity to work in a government agency or non-governmental organization of her choice for 10 months after graduation.

Within her research and scholarship, Ananya has aimed to debunk the myth that technology is value-neutral and apolitical, and has strived to imagine a more inclusive digital world. Her time at Stanford has centered on exploring this critical analysis and gaining hands-on experience in this field. During her freshman year, she conducted background research for the book System Error: Where Big Tech Went Wrong and How We Can Reboot, and she moderated a speaker event with Uber whistleblower Susan Fowler. As a sophomore, she was Course Manager for CS182: Ethics, Public Policy, and Technological Change and joined the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society as a student fellow. Since the start of her junior year, Ananya has been working as a research assistant and course coordinator for Embedded EthiCS, an initiative to incorporate ethics curriculum into Stanford computer science classes. Now in her senior year, Ananya has also co-designed and co-taught an Alternative Spring Break course on issues of race, power, and oppression in relation to emerging technologies. 

As a human rights minor, Ananya has participated in our gateway class, HUMRTS 101: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Human Rights Theory and Practice, as well as HUMRTS 103: Transitional Justice, Human Rights, and International Criminal Tribunals, and has worked as a intern for the Business and Human Rights Resource Center. Most notably, for her human rights capstone project, Ananya wrote a stunning paper on the construction of state memory in post-genocide Rwanda, where she explored the nuanced functions of international criminal tribulans as mechanisms for true transitional justice and accountability.  As she begins her Gardner fellowship, Ananya hopes to learn more about the international human rights ecosystem and about different models of advocacy.