Liberty University’s Research Week will take place on campus April 20–23, 2026, and I have been invited to participate! I will be delivering an oral presentation in the Theoretical Proposal category titled “Human Data as Personhood: A Theological-Legal Framework for Protecting Immutable Embodied Identity.” The presentation addresses a foundational problem in contemporary digital governance. Data drawn from bodies, behaviors, and life histories is increasingly treated as a commercial resource, even as it functions as a stand-in for the human person.
The presentation argues that prevailing legal and technological frameworks misclassify identity-bearing data by treating it as alienable property. Biometric identifiers, genetic information, health records, and long-term behavioral metadata arise from embodied and relational identity. These data forms increasingly shape access, risk assessment, and institutional decision-making, yet regulatory structures remain oriented toward efficiency and scalability rather than dignity, agency, and moral limit.
Drawing on theological anthropology grounded in the imago Dei, dignity-based jurisprudence, and comparative privacy frameworks, the presentation synthesizes existing scholarship to develop a personhood-centered theoretical model for future research. The framework distinguishes transactional data from identity-rooted information and identifies areas where current governance structures fail to account for the ethical weight of identity inference and aggregation.
Although empirical research has not been conducted in this category, the proposal offers concrete directions for future inquiry and practical legal and policy advisements. These include implications for artificial intelligence governance, purpose-restriction norms, consent architecture, and legislative approaches that protect embodied identity rather than facilitate extraction.
Research Week provides a setting for careful interdisciplinary reflection on how systems of power encode assumptions about the human person. This presentation contributes a theoretical foundation for reorienting digital governance toward the protection of human dignity and the responsible stewardship of identity-bearing data.