Nevada City Rotary celebrates Rotary Global Scholar, Evani Radiya-Dixit

My name is Evani Radiya-Dixit, and I had the incredible opportunity to conduct research at the University of Cambridge from 2021 to 2022 with the support of the Rotary Global Grant Scholarship. At Cambridge, I examined the risks and harms of police use of facial recognition surveillance in the UK. Specifically, I developed an audit to assess the ethics and legality of police use of facial recognition technology, and then applied this audit to three British police deployments of the technology. This experience has led me to my current work on the societal impact of technology.

Following my research at Cambridge, I have been pursuing a master’s degree in Sociology at Stanford University. Here, I have been focusing on the impact of surveillance technology on society, especially on communities of color and other marginalized groups. In April of this year, I organized a panel on this topic, where I brought together activists and researchers whose work I had read in the UK. This work drew on the engagements that I had with activists, civil society groups, and researchers in the UK. In August, I published a brief discussing takeaways from the panel with the Stanford Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity.

 

At Stanford, I was also a teaching assistant for a course on tech ethics and policy. Additionally, I have taken courses on social science methods, the sociology of science, and the role of race in education. Over the upcoming months, I will continue to take classes that build on the learnings and experiences that I had through the Rotary