Bio
Dragana Kaurin is a human rights researcher and ethnographer working at the intersection of technology, human rights and migration. Her past work includes researching the use of mobile phones by refugees in Europe and community tactics in filming police encounters in the United States. She is the founder and executive director of Localization Lab, a non-profit organization that works on technology adoption with local communities and provides user feedback. She is also a 2018–2019 research fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.
Before starting Localization Lab in 2013, Dragana worked as a program officer at the Open Technology Institute, and as a data analyst at Ushahidi, a non-profit organization and mapping platform used for election monitoring and documenting violence using crowdsourced eyewitness reports. She holds bachelor’s degrees in cultural anthropology and Arabic language from Ohio State University. Before entering the Human Rights Program at Columbia University, where she researched civic tech and refugee rights, she worked in crisis information management and C4D (communication for development) at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and at the United Nations Children’s Fund. She speaks English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Serbo-Croatian.