Petra Molnar is a lawyer and anthropologist specializing in technology, migration, and human rights. A former classical musician, she has been working in migrant justice since 2008 as a settlement worker, researcher and lawyer and she writes about issues around immigration detention, health and human rights, gender-based violence, as well as the politics of refugee, immigration, and international law. Petra has worked all over the world including Kenya, Jordan, Turkey, Philippines, Colombia, Canada, and various parts of Europe. She is currently co-creator of the Migration and Technology Monitor, a collective of civil society, journalists, academics, and filmmakers interrogating technological experiments on people crossing borders. She is also the Associate Director of the Refugee Law Lab at York University and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Centre for Critical Internet at Harvard University.
Petra is the author of numerous academic and popular press publications on technology and migration and one of the leading international voices on these issues. Her work has been widely featured in The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and the New York Times, among others, and she is frequently quoted in international and local media as well as various policy briefings at the national and international level. Petra co-drafted an influential report on digital borders and racism by the UN Special Rapporteur on Discrimination, Racism, Xenophobia and Related Forms of Intolerance Tendayi Achiume. Petra is also the co-author of “Bots at the Gate,” an internationally recognized report on the human rights impacts of automated decision-making in immigration and refugee systems. Her recent report, Technological Testing Grounds, foregrounds the perspectives of people on the move in Greece and Europe as they interact with violent surveillance technologies.
Petra holds a Juris Doctorate from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, a Masters of Anthropology from York University, Centre for Refugee studies, and an LL.M in International Law from the University of Cambridge. For Petra, migration issues are personal as a person from a multi-hyphenated background and she continues to dedicate her life to the abolition of violent border regimes.
Her book, ARTIFICAL BORDERS, is a narrative nonfiction examining how AI, surveillance, and technological experimentation being used in border spaces around the world are making already violent global border policies even sharper and all the more arbitrary, with disastrous consequences. It will be on offer soon.
Petra is represented by Amanda Orozco and Brenna English-Loeb.