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WORK TITLE: Imagination
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WEBSITE: http://www.ruhabenjamin.com/
CITY: Princeton
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COUNTRY: United States
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LAST VOLUME: CA 351
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PERSONAL
Born in Wai, India.
EDUCATION:Waterford Kamhlaba United World College of Southern Africa, international baccalaureate, 1996; Spelman College, B.A., 2001; University of California, Berkeley, M.A., Ph.D., 2008; University of California, Los Angeles, postdoctoral fellowship, 2010.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Sociologist, researcher, educator, and writer. University of California, Berkeley, Center for Society & Genetics, graduate student researcher, 2002-08; University of California, Los Angeles, postdoctoral researcher and instructor, 2008-10; Boston University, Boston, MA, assistant professor of sociology and African American Studies, 2010—14; Harvard University, Kennedy School of Government, Cambridge, MA, visiting faculty fellow, 2012—13; Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University, 2014—. Also participant in the Race, Education, and Democracy STEM Network, Boston, MA; and founder of Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton University.
MEMBER:American Sociological Association, Sociologists for Women in Society.
AWARDS:Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award for antiracist scholarship, 2020, and Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction, 2020, both for Race after Technology; Stowe Prize for Literary Activism, 2023, for Viral Justice; American Council of Learned Societies fellowship; named MacArthur Fellow, MacArthur Foundation, 2024.
WRITINGS
Contributor to books, including Genetics and Global Public Health: Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia, edited by Simon Dyson and Karl Atkin, Routledge, 2012. Contributor to numerous periodicals, including Los Angeles Review of Books, Theory and Event, Policy & Society and Ethnicity & Health. Contributor to the Huffington Post Web site. Member of the editorial board of the New York University book series “Biopolitics: Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the Twenty-First Century.”
SIDELIGHTS
Sociologist Ruha Benjamin was born in Wai, India, to an African American father and Persian Indian mother. Benjamin’s academic interests revolve around the relationship among science, technology, medicine, and society. Specifically, both her research and teaching interests include social studies of science, medicine, and biotechnology; racial and ethnic formations; the sociology of knowledge; and gender and biopolitics. In her first book, People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier, Benjamin explores the stem cell research controversy in relation to scientific innovation and social equity.
People’s Science focuses on California’s 2004 stem cell initiative and the “right to stem cell research” as codified in Proposition 71 and the California constitution. She examines the many lives it has affected, both those who have and those who have not benefited from regenerative medicine initiatives. In doing so, Benjamin explores the relationship to America’s commitment to an equitable society. “ People’s Science is about the social impact and meaning of stem cell research for different groups—like how women’s health is affected by donating eggs for research, whether poor people will benefit from expensive therapies, and concerns about African Americans being treated like medical guinea pigs,” Benjamin told Brookline Hub Web site contributor Jennifer Campaniolo.
In her interview with Campaniolo, Benjamin recounted how she first became interested in writing about equity in medical care. During an interview more than a decade ago, Benjamin learned from a young black woman that she was sterilized after a cesarean section when she became pregnant as a teenager. The woman was semiconscious when the doctor asked her mother if a tubal ligation could be performed on her daughter before the doctor closed up the incision in the abdomen. It was the 1990s, and the mother consented.
Benjamin discovered the topic for a book about medical equity approximately five years later. California voters rejected President George W. Bush’s federal restrictions against stem cell research by approving three billion dollars for such research, which was conducted by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine (CIRM). To get an inside look at the effort, Benjamin got herself hired by a group that supported the proposition and conducted research on the reasons why some people objected to the proposition. “I was eager to learn who would be included and excluded from this unprecedented investment in a new and promising field—and how precisely public participation would be enacted,” Benjamin told Brookline Hub Web site contributor Campaniolo, later adding: “After seven years of research and writing, People’s Science is the culmination of what I found when I peeled back the slick packaging of a quasi-populist scientific initiative.”
Writing in People’s Science, Benjamin calls the research initiative ironic because, at the same time, California was operating under a serious deficit. In addition, California voters rejected funding to provide more health care to the poor. Benjamin goes on to stress that she believes any drugs or therapies developed by the initially publicly funded stem cell research at CIRM should be available to everyone instead of just those rich enough to pay for it. “An impressive work of seminal scholarship, People’s Science is a deftly written inquiry into the social issue implications of how scientific research is conducted in our democratic society,” wrote Reviewer’s Bookwatch contributor Andy Jordan.
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After editing Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, Abraham’s next book continued to explore the intersection of race and technology. Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code described how new technologies such as apps and algorithms were reinforcing racism and white supremacy despite appearing to be race-neutral. Abraham provided readers with a greater understanding of how technology could reinforce social control and do genuine harm to individuals and society at large.
Abraham was more optimistic in her next book, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want. A combination of memoir and exhortation, the book was inspired by the horrors of anti-Black police violence and the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a particularly tragic impact on the Black community. Rather than succumb to despair, however, Abraham encouraged readers to see how the choices they make every day can have an impact on society and bring about social change. She focused on community organizers as well as doulas and midwives, who can make a profound difference for Black mothers and their babies. The book was awarded the Stowe Prize for Literary Activism in 2023.
Alessandro Cimino, writing in Library Journal, lauded the book as “emotional and thought-provoking” and a “rich and engaging space for collective healing.” He also praised Abraham for showing why “structural hurdles must be removed” if real justice is to come about. A writer in Kirkus Reviews concurred, calling the book a “powerful, urgent plea for individual responsibility in an unjust world.” They noted that Benjamin draws on a wide variety of resources including sociologists, educators, historians, and epidemiologists but also uses her own experiences and those of family members and friends to make her case. The result is that Abraham argues “convincingly” that “a redistribution of resources to overcome inequality” will be necessary to bring about justice.
Abraham continued in a similar vein in her 2025 book, Imagination: A Manifesto, where she encourages and challenges readers to imagine a different world. This could include everything from schools that foster the genius of every child to one where prisons are unnecessary. Her manifesto rests on the argument that society currently benefits the few at the expense of everyone else, and that that needs to change. She encourages people to start working collectively to challenge the status quo so as to inspire people that a different world is possible.
“A potent exhortation for society to point its dreams toward the collective good,” wrote a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. They described the book as a “wide-ranging treatise” that “moves nimbly between topics to make [Abraham’s] case.” A writer in Kirkus Reviews agreed, calling the book “provocative” and “one that deserves a wide audience.” They praised Abraham for often being “refreshingly direct.”
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BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2022, review of Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want; January 1, 2024, review of Imagination: A Manifesto.
Library Journal, July, 2022, Alessandro Cimino, review of Viral Justice.
Publishers Weekly, April 29, 2013, review of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier, p. 125; December 18, 2023, review of Imagination, p. 82.
Reviewer’s Bookwatch, November 10, 2013, Andy Jordan, review of People’s Science.
States News Service, October 1, 2024, “Princeton Ruha Benjmani Awarded MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant.”
UWire Text, October 2, 2024, Annie Rupertus, “Prof. Ruha Benjamin Awarded MacArthur Grant amid Protest Investigation,” p. 1.
ONLINE
American Council of Learned Societies Web site, http://www.acls.org/ (November 21, 2013), author profile.
Boston University Web site, http://www.bu.edu/ (November 21, 2013), author profile.
Brookline Hub, http:// www.brooklinehub.com/ (June 3, 2013), Jennifer Campaniolo, “Booked: Ruha Benjamin,” author interview.
John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation website, https://www.macfound.org (October 1, 2024), author profile.
Leonardo Online, http: //leonardo.info/ (November 21, 2013), Richard Kade, review of People’s Science.
Princeton University African American Studies website, https://aas.princeton.edu (December 17, 2024), author profile.
Ruha Benjamin website, http://www.ruhabenjamin.com (December 17, 2024).
Verbatim Lecture Management Web site, http://verbatimlectures.com/ (November 21, 2013), author profile.
Ruha Benjamin
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ruha Benjamin
Born 1978
Wai, Maharashtra, India
Academic background
Education Spelman College (BA)
University of California, Berkeley (MA, PhD)
Academic work
Discipline Sociology
Institutions Princeton University
Main interests Science, Medicine, and Technology; Race-Ethnicity and Gender; Knowledge and Power
Website www.ruhabenjamin.com
Ruha Benjamin is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.[1] The primary focus of her work is the relationship between innovation and equity, particularly the intersection of race, justice, and technology. Benjamin is the author of numerous publications, including the books People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013), Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022).
Benjamin is also a prominent public intellectual, having spoken to audiences across the Americas, Europe, Africa, and Asia, delivering presentations to the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination[2] and NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund,[3][4] a 2021 AAAS keynote,[5] 2020 ICLR keynote[6] and the 8th Annual Patrusky Lecture.[7]
Benjamin's work has been featured in popular outlets that include Essence Magazine,[8] LA Times,[9] The Washington Post,[10] The New York Times,[11] San Francisco Chronicle,[12] The Root,[13] Motherboard,[14] The Guardian,[15] Vox,[16] Teen Vogue,[17] National Geographic,[18] STAT,[19] CNN,[20] New Statesman,[21] Slate,[22] Jezebel,[23] Boston Review,[24] and The Huffington Post.[25]
Early life
Benjamin and her book Race After Technology at the 2019 Black in AI event
Benjamin was born to an African-American father and a mother of Indian and Persian descent.[26] She describes her interest in the relationship between science, technology, and medicine as prompted by her early life. She was born in a clinic in Wai, Maharashtra, India. Hearing her parents' stories about the interaction of human bodies with medical technology in the clinic sparked her interest.[27] She has lived and spent time in many different places, including "many Souths": South Central Los Angeles; Conway, South Carolina; Majuro, South Pacific, and Swaziland, Southern Africa, and cites these experiences and cultures as influential in her way of looking at the world.[27]
Career
Benjamin received her Bachelor of Arts in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College before completing her PhD in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics in 2010 before taking a faculty fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society Program. From 2010 to 2014, Benjamin was Assistant Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at Boston University.[28]
In 2013, Benjamin's first book, People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier, was published by Stanford University Press.[29] In it, she critically investigates how innovation and design often builds upon or reinforces inequalities. In particular, Benjamin investigates how and why scientific, commercial, and popular discourses and practices around genomics have incorporated racial-ethnic and gendered categories. In People's Science, Benjamin also argues for a more inclusive, responsible, and public scientific community.[30]
In 2019, her book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code was published by Polity.[31] In it, Benjamin expands upon her previous research and analysis by focusing on a range of ways in which social hierarchies, particularly racism, are embedded in the logical layer of internet-based technologies. She develops her concept of the "New Jim Code", which references Michelle Alexander's work The New Jim Crow, to analyze how seemingly "neutral" algorithms and applications can replicate or worsen racial bias.[15]
Race After Technology won the 2020 Oliver Cox Cromwell Book Prize awarded by the American Sociological Association Section on Race & Ethnic Relations, the 2020 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Award for Nonfiction,[32] and Honorable Mention for the 2020 Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Book Award.[33] Fast Company also selected it as one of "8 Books on Technology You Should Read in 2020".[34]
A review in The Nation noted: "What's ultimately distinctive about Race After Technology is that its withering critiques of the present are so galvanizing. The field Benjamin maps is treacherous and phantasmic, full of obstacles and trip wires whose strength lies in their invisibility. But each time she pries open a black box, linking the present to some horrific past, the future feels more open-ended, more mutable…This is perhaps Benjamin’s greatest feat in the book: Her inventive and wide-ranging analyses remind us that as much as we try to purge ourselves from our tools and view them as external to our flaws, they are always extensions of us. As exacting a worldview as that is, it is also inclusive and hopeful."[35]
In 2019, a book she edited, Captivating Technology: Reimagining Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life, was released by Duke University Press,[36] examining how carceral logics shape social life well beyond prisons and police.
Benjamin is Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her work focuses on dimensions of science, technology, and medicine, race and citizenship, knowledge and power. In 2018, she founded the JUST DATA Lab,[37] a space for activists, technologists and artists to reassess how data can be used for justice. She also serves on the Executive Committees for the Program in Global Health and Health Policy[38] and Center for Digital Humanities at the University of Princeton.
On September 25, 2020, Benjamin was named as one of the 25 members of the "Real Facebook Oversight Board", an independent monitoring group over Facebook.[39]
On April 11, 2024, at Spelman College's Founders Day Convocation, she received an honorary Doctor of Science degree.[40][41]
Honors and awards
Benjamin is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Fund Freedom Scholar Award,[42] fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies,[43] National Science Foundation, and Institute for Advanced Study, among others.[44] In 2017 she received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton.[45] In 2024, Benjamin was named a MacArthur Fellow.[46]
Publications
Books
People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier. Stanford University Press. 2013. ISBN 9780804782975.
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Polity. 2019. ISBN 9781509526390.
(As editor) Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life. Duke University Press. 2019. ISBN 978-1-4780-0381-6.
Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want. Princeton University Press, 2022. ISBN 9780691222882[47]
Articles
(2009). "A Lab of Their Own: Genomic Sovereignty as Postcolonial Science Policy". Policy & Society, Vol. 28, Issue 4: 3.
(2011), "Organized Ambivalence: When Stem Cell Research & Sickle Cell Disease Converge". Ethnicity & Health, Vol. 16, Issue 4–5: 447–463.
(2012). "Genetics and Global Public Health: Sickle Cell and Thalassaemia". Ch. 11 in Simon Dyson and Karl Atkin (eds), Organized Ambivalence: When Stem Cell Research & Sickle Cell Disease Converge (Routledge).
(2015). "The Emperor’s New Genes: Science, Public Policy, and the Allure of Objectivity". Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 661: 130–142.
(2016). "Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods". Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Vol. 2, Issue 2: 1–28.[48]
(2016). "Informed Refusal: Toward a Justice-based Bioethics". Science, Technology, and Human Values, Vol. 4, Issue 6: 967–990.[49]
(2016). "Catching Our Breath: Critical Race STS and the Carceral Imagination". Engaging Science, Technology and Society, Vol. 2: 145–156.[50]
(2017). "Cultura Obscura: Race, Power, and ‘Culture Talk’ in the Health Sciences". American Journal of Law and Medicine, Invited special issue, edited by Bridges, Keel, and Obasogie, Vol. 43, Issue 2-3: 225–238.[51]
(2018). "Black Afterlives Matter: Cultivating Kinfulness as Reproductive Justice". In Making Kin Not Population, edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway. Prickly Paradigm Press.[52] (Republished in Boston Review[24])
(2018). "Prophets and Profits of Racial Science". Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, Vol. 5, Issue 1: 41–53.[53]
(2019). "Assessing Risk, Automating Racism". Science, Vol. 366, Issue 6464, pp. 421–422.[54]
Ruha Benjamin
Transdisciplinary Scholar and Writer Class of 2024
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Portrait of Ruha Benjamin
Illuminating how technology reflects and reproduces inequality and championing the role of imagination in social transformation.
location icon Location
Princeton, New Jersey
age iconAge
46 at time of award
area of focus iconArea of Focus
Sociology, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, History of Science and Technology
website iconWebsite(s)
ruhabenjamin.comPrinceton University: Ruha BenjaminIda B. Wells Just Data Lab
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About Ruha's Work
Ruha Benjamin is a transdisciplinary scholar and writer illuminating how advances in science, medicine, and technology reflect and reproduce social inequality. By integrating critical analysis of innovation with attentiveness to the potential for positive change, Benjamin demonstrates the importance of imagination and grassroots activism in shaping social policies and cultural practices.
In People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013), Benjamin examines the persistent gap between those who contribute to new medical technologies and those who actually benefit from them. She uses the California Stem Cell Initiative as a case study to illustrate a persistent problem in medical research: socially marginalized groups engaged for research purposes but not guaranteed access to the treatments that result from that research. Benjamin further investigates the intersection of science and society in Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019). In this work, she exposes the racial hierarchies and systems of social control embedded in seemingly neutral algorithms and automated systems that people interact with daily. These technologies, which rely on biased training data and flawed assumptions, cause direct harm to individuals and communities. Benjamin provides numerous examples of digital systems that perpetuate what she calls the “New Jim Code,” such as marketing algorithms that promote real estate based on “ethnic preferences,” thereby maintaining segregated neighborhoods, and crime prediction software that justifies intrusive surveillance of communities of color.
In her two most recent books, Benjamin weaves together personal experience and social analysis. Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022) is a poignant meditation on how individuals drive meaningful social change. She advocates for the power of grassroots initiatives that prioritize care over control, such as doulas focused on birth equity and tenant organizers fighting the legacy of redlining. In Imagination: A Manifesto (2024), Benjamin argues that we are constrained by policies and paradigms that result from the narrow imagination of those who monopolize power and resources and seek to benefit the few at the expense of the many. She urges readers to challenge the assumptions and logics underpinning systems of oppression as a first step toward creating a world in which everyone can thrive. In addition to her scholarship, Benjamin collaborates with community organizations on digital justice initiatives. As founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, she works with students, organizers, and artists to identify, challenge, and transform tech-mediated harms. Benjamin deepens our understanding of the dangers that technological advancements pose to vulnerable populations while reimagining what counts as innovation and who gets to shape our collective future.
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Biography
Ruha Benjamin received a BA from Spelman College (2001) and an MA (2004) and PhD (2008) from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab (since 2020). Previously, Benjamin was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Genetics and Society at University of California, Los Angeles (2008-2010), visiting faculty fellow at Harvard University’s Program on Science, Technology, and Society (2012–2013), and assistant professor of sociology at Boston University (2010–2014). Benjamin is the editor of Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (2019), and her articles have been published in journals such as Science; American Journal of Law and Medicine; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience; and Science, Technology, & Human Values, among others.
Published on October 1, 2024
Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies
Affiliation
Department of African American Studies
Office Phone
(609) 258-6936(Link opens phone app)
Email
ruha@princeton.edu
Office
109A Morrison Hall
Office Hours
On Leave AY25
Website
ruhabenjamin.com(Link is external)
Bio/Description
Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American studies at Princeton University where she specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and social inequity. She is author of four books, including Imagination: A Manifesto(Link is external) (Norton 2024), Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want(Link is external) (Princeton University Press 2022), winner of the 2023 Stowe Prize, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code(Link is external) (Polity 2019), winner of the 2020 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award for antiracist scholarship and the 2020 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction, People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier(Link is external) (Stanford University Press 2013), and editor of Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life(Link is external) (Duke University Press 2019).
Professor Benjamin received her BA in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College, MA and PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University’s Science, Technology, and Society Program. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and Institute for Advanced Study. In 2017, she received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton; in 2020, the Marguerite Casey Foundation Inaugural Freedom Scholar Award; and in 2024, Ruha was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship.
I am Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and Founding Director of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab. As a a transdisciplinary scholar, writer and educator, I take a critical and creative approach to investigating the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine.
Over the last decade, I have written four books, Imagination: A Manifesto (Norton 2024), Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (Princeton University Press 2022), Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity 2019), People’s Science: Bodies & Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013), and edited Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Duke University Press 2019).
Taken together, this body of work addresses debates about how science and technology shape the social world and how people can, should, and do critically and creatively engage technoscience, grappling all the while with the fact that what may bring health and longevity to some may threaten the dignity and rights of others.
I arrived here by way of a winding road that has snaked through South Central Los Angeles; Conway, South Carolina; Majuro, South Pacific, and Swaziland, Southern Africa. I come from many Souths, and I tend to bring this perspective, of looking at the world from its underbelly, to my analysis.
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To start at the proverbial beginning, my interest in the relationship between science, technology, medicine, and society can be traced to this clinic in Wai (pronounced “Why”), India, where I was born to a Persian-Indian mother and African-American father. Their stories of the one-size-fits-all stirrups, stainless steel bed around which resident-chickens squawked, and nurses who waited on my mom day and night—ignited my imagination about the places where cold tools and warm humans meet.
Whether we dub it ‘science and society’, ‘medicine and culture’, ‘technology and values’, the relationship between what are commonly thought of as separate spheres of human experience fuel many of my current preoccupations. My work as a researcher and teacher continues to take shape in the borderlands of mainstream institutions and the messiness of everyday life.
Dad’s Side
Dad’s Side
Mom’s Side
Mom’s Side
The way we classify and are classified as different human kinds, is another enduring interest that grows out of the social boundary crossing of the folks pictured above. This family was my first classroom, where I became a student of race-ethnicity, gender, class, citizenship, and diaspora — an ongoing touchstone for questioning what ‘comes naturally.’ They also helped me to see that innovation isn’t limited to shiny new gadgets and experimentation doesn’t just happen in sterile laboratories; people experiment and innovate in their everyday lives all the time, challenging ‘how things have always been done’, and producing knowledge and tools for living a good life that are valuable well beyond the patent office.
So when it all boils down, the tension between innovation and equity is mainly what keeps me up at night.
How do we develop approaches to health and well-being that don’t simply substitute technological fixes for wider social change? Fixes that do more to widen the gross inequities that already stratify life chances? How do we advance life sciences without reinforcing popular conceptions of race … as biological? Gender… as destiny? Or disability… as tragic? After all, as we push the boundaries of the ‘human’ with science and technology, we are also reinforcing (and sometimes redrawing) social fault lines in often-unexpected ways.
In case you made your way here looking for a more formal overview of my academic history, the following represents some highlights:
International Baccalaureate, Waterford Kamhlaba United World College of Southern Africa (1996)
BA in Sociology and Anthropology, Spelman College (2001)
MA and PhD in Sociology, University of California, Berkeley (2008)
Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Society and Genetics, University of California, Los Angeles (2010)
Faculty Fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School Science, Technology, and Society Program (2012-13)
Member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (2016-17)
Benjamin, Ruha VIRAL JUSTICE Princeton Univ. (NonFiction None) $29.95 10, 11 ISBN: 978-0-691-22288-2
Small steps toward a just world.
Benjamin, a professor of African American studies at Princeton, offers an impassioned argument for the need to foster the "deep-rooted interdependence" that characterizes strong communities and to counter the ableism, sexism, racism, and classism that lead to injustice and inequality. Besides drawing on the findings of sociologists, epidemiologists, educators, and historians, among others, Benjamin shares her own experiences as the daughter of a Black American father and Indian-born mother of Persian descent, as well as the experiences of her family and friends, to expose the effects of racism in education, health care, policing and punishment, housing, economic opportunity, political participation, and scientific research. The victimization of her mentally ill brother by a "ravenous carceral system" informs her vision of police reform that would divert funding to housing, education, and community support. Turning to education, she exposes the "myth of meritocracy"--the idea that hard work and innate talent always lead to educational and professional success. In an "apartheid-like system" of education that is organized by race and class, success unfortunately breeds entitlement and "elitist delusions of specialness" rather than an awareness that achievement depends on luck: where, to whom, and in what economic stratum you were born. Benjamin reveals racism in hospitals, doctors' offices, and the designs of research studies, where Black bodies are probed and tested but not provided adequate health care based on the outcomes of research. Impatient with the "datafication of injustice," she claims we do not need more studies or more evidence. We need only the will to look at ourselves and "to individually confront how we participate in unjust systems." Viral justice, argues the author convincingly, entails a redistribution of resources to overcome inequality and to create "communities of care" that support everyone's needs. Each of us, she writes, must "question the roles and narrative you've inherited, and scheme with others to seed a different world."
A powerful, urgent plea for individual responsibility in an unjust world.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2022 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Benjamin, Ruha: VIRAL JUSTICE." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2022, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A715352711/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fbcc716b. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.
Imagination: A Manifesto
Ruha Benjamin. Norton, $22 (192p) ISBN 978-1-324-02097-4
Benjamin (Viral Justice) posits in this wide-ranging treatise that "collective imagination" will be a key force behind the creation of an emerging new social order. Arguing that the world is "between stories" (quoting historian Thomas Berry) and thus ready to discard dead ideas of racism and nationalism and dream new social arrangements into being, Benjamin asserts that "it matters whose imaginations get to materialize as our shared future." She cautions that society is in danger of being ensnared by the quasiutopias on offer from tech titans, where the well-off escape problems rather than solve them and technology is used to police and surveil regular people. Benjamin goes on to critique other realms of failed imagination, including America's education system ("a site of spirit murder") and prison system. She highlights projects that, in her view, direct collective imagination toward more just and humane outcomes, ranging from experiments in data sovereignty in Barcelona to a virtual reality art installation honoring Breonna Taylor's life. Throughout, Benjamin's roving narrative moves nimbly between topics to make her case (at one exemplary point she pauses her analysis of a documentary on creative writing programs for prisoners to note how it reminds her of a line from Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go: "Could a creature without a human spirit create such heart-wrenching paintings?"). It's a potent exhortation for society to point its dreams toward the collective good. (Feb.)
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
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Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Imagination: A Manifesto." Publishers Weekly, vol. 270, no. 51, 18 Dec. 2023, p. 82. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A779652529/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=8ffa64b5. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.
Benjamin, Ruha IMAGINATION Norton (NonFiction None) $22.00 2, 6 ISBN: 9781324020974
Princeton sociologist Benjamin takes Toni Morrison's advice to "dream a little before you think" and runs with it.
In this brief treatise, imagination is both a noun and an imperative, and the author's usage is "unruly." In essence, Benjamin invites readers to consider a different world, one that the imagination of others tells us is the best of all possible worlds. It's fruitful, for instance, to imagine not an America in which exceptional "unicorns" of color are marked as evidence that the educational system is colorblind, but instead one in which a new system of education is created to "cultivate everyone's creativity and curiosity." Just so, Benjamin writes, we need to collectively imagine ways to combat such things as racism, climate change, economic inequality, and the like. Sometimes the author's language is a touch jargony, unless you like rubrics such as "transition imaginaries," but more often she's refreshingly direct: "We can transform the hostile environments that try to trap us--whether they are literal cages, barbed wire-encircled playgrounds, or bullet-friendly classrooms. We can imagine otherwise." The author also examines efforts to put this kind of imagining into practice, such as a board game that turns Monopoly on its head by teaching the values of economic cooperation, and an imagined border in which steel walls give way to binational cities. One of Benjamin's experiments, as she describes it, was a delightful remaking of daily life in isolation via beekeeping. "Not only do bees teach us that collaboration is how we survive, that decision-making should be collective but also that we don't have to choose between working hard and creating beautiful, sweet things." Benjamin closes with a set of writing and thinking prompts that will enliven curricula and dinner-table conversations alike.
A provocative manifesto indeed, and one that deserves a wide audience.
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"Benjamin, Ruha: IMAGINATION." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Jan. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A777736933/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1b3c9478. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.
PRINCETON, New Jersey -- The following information was released by Princeton University:
By
Rebekah Schroeder, Office of Communications
on Oct. 1, 2024, 12:01 p.m.
Ruha Benjamin, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, has been awarded a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship for "illuminating how technology reflects and reproduces social inequality and championing the role of imagination in social transformation."
"By integrating critical analysis of innovation with attentiveness to the potential for positive change, Benjamin demonstrates the importance of imagination and grassroots activism in shaping social policies and cultural practices," the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation said in its announcement.
Benjamin is one of 22 MacArthur Fellows in the 2024 cohort, a group of scientists, artists, scholars, and activists who will each receive an $800,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation over a five-year period. The prestigious fellowships, known informally as "genius grants," recognize individuals who have demonstrated "exceptional originality in and dedication to their creative pursuits."
"Ruha Benjamin's innovative, interdisciplinary scholarship has brought critical new perspectives to our understanding of racial and social inequities in technology, science, and medicine," said Princeton President Christopher L. Eisgruber. "Professor Benjamin is a strikingly original and creative thinker, writer, and educator who inspires her students and readers."
In her scholarship, Benjamin studies the social dimensions of science, medicine and technology. She joined the Princeton faculty in 2014 and is currently on sabbatical.
She is a 2017 recipient of the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching and the founding director of the Ida B. Wells JUST Data Lab. She was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) from 2016 to 2017.
Her research has been published in journals such as Science, the American Journal of Law and Medicine, and Science, Technology, and Human Values. Benjamin was among the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Fund's inaugural cohort of Freedom Scholars in 2020.
She is also an award-winning author and popular speaker who has delivered talks on both the TED and TEDx stages and has written for The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN and The Guardian, among other publications.
Her most recent book, "Imagination: A Manifesto" (Norton, 2024), showcases artists, educators and activists in a narrative that she has called "a proclamation of the power of the imagination." Her acclaimed 2022 book, "Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want" (Princeton University Press) won the 2023 Stowe Prize for Literary Activism, which recognizes "a distinguished book of general adult fiction or nonfiction whose written work illuminates a critical social justice issue in the tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe's 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"
Benjamin is also the author of "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code" (Polity, 2019) and "People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier" (Stanford University Press, 2013). She is the editor of "Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life" (Duke University Press, 2019).
Benjamin received her B.A. in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College and earned her M.A. and Ph.D. in sociology from the University of California-Berkeley.
She completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University's Program on Science, Technology, and Society. She was an assistant professor of sociology at Boston University before joining Princeton.
In addition to her tenure at IAS, she has received fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
"MacArthur Fellows are nominated anonymously by leaders in their respective fields and considered by an anonymous selection committee," according to the foundation's announcement of 2024 fellows.
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"PRINCETON PROFESSOR RUHA BENJAMIN AWARDED MACARTHUR 'GENIUS' GRANT." States News Service, 1 Oct. 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A810827662/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fab0c317. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.
African American Studies professor Ruha Benjamin has been awarded a MacArthur "genius grant," the University announced on Tuesday, Oct. 1. Later that day, Benjamin shared on X an exchange with University communications revealing that the University had opened an investigation into her support of pro-Palestine protesters.
In preparation for the MacArthur announcement, Benjamin answered a number of questions from University communications staff in emails she shared with The Daily Princetonian. When they asked about her reaction to the news, Benjamin wrote that she found out she'd been awarded the fellowship "the morning after a tense call with Princeton [U]niversity officials investigating my support of students protesting the genocide in Gaza."
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Benjamin has been a fixture of pro-Palestine activism at Princeton. She revealed to the 'Prince' on Tuesday that the University interviewed her on Aug. 27 as part of an investigation into her role during the Clio Hall occupation in April.
Her response to communications staff continued, "What would have been a moment of pure joy and excitement was tempered by the sense that the same institutions that are quick to celebrate our accomplishments have been slow to respond to students' demands to disclose and divest from genocidal violence."
Benjamin included a note alongside her responses, which read, "I understand that my response to the first question puts you in a tricky position. However, I do not want to lose the context in which I experienced the call, so if for any reason you are unable to include my account, I would ask that no quotes from me be used in the article."
In line with this request, communications staff chose to not include her testimony. Benjamin ultimately shared her responses in full on X.
"In the end, I wasn't surprised that the Office of Communications chose not to include my responses to their questions, because the homepage isn't journalism. It's PR for the [U]niversity," Benjamin wrote in a statement to the 'Prince.'
University communications declined to comment to the 'Prince.'
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"We've heard so much about free expression since the school year began," she added. "[Y]et it seems the [U]niversity draws the line when that expression casts the institution in an unfavorable light (as did my responses) or creates any disruption to business as usual."
The MacArthur Fellowship, which is awarded to 22 scholars, writers, and artists each year, comes with an $800,000 award disbursed over a five-year period. The foundation wrote that, "By integrating critical analysis of innovation with attentiveness to the potential for positive change, Benjamin demonstrates the importance of imagination and grassroots activism in shaping social policies and cultural practices."
Benjamin's work focuses primarily on the intersection of technology and race. She's been awarded for both her writing and her teaching, having received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton in 2017.
In the University's announcement on Tuesday, President Christopher Eisgruber '83 said, "Professor Benjamin is a strikingly original and creative thinker, writer, and educator who inspires her students and readers."
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In her statement to University communications, Benjamin shared details about her current pursuits while on sabbatical, which include a virtual reality project called "Phoenix of Gaza" and a collaborative multimedia work "about the relationship between friendship and freedom dreaming." She also noted her work on her next book, which will examine Black and Indigenous knowledge alongside the ecological costs of innovation.
While she continues her research, Benjamin remains in the dark about the University's investigation into her conduct. She wrote to the 'Prince' that she has not received any updates since she was interviewed by investigators on Aug. 27.
Benjamin and three other faculty members entered the building during the occupation on April 29, leaving prior to the 13 arrests later that day. She later released a statement chronicling what she observed at the protest, noting that she and the other professors were present in a faculty observer capacity.
Those 13 arrestees, which included undergraduates, graduate students, a postdoc, and a Princeton Theological Seminary student, appeared in court Tuesday -- the same day as the MacArthur grant announcement. Five of the 13 were students in the African American Studies department.
Benjamin's support for student protesters remains steadfast. In her statement to University communications, Benjamin wrote, "I plan to 'celebrate' the award by showing up to court."
Annie Rupertus is a head News editor for the 'Prince' from Philadelphia, Pa. who often covers activism and campus governance.
Please send any corrections to corrections[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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Rupertus, Annie. "Prof. Ruha Benjamin awarded MacArthur grant amid protest investigation." UWIRE Text, 2 Oct. 2024, p. 1. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A810946237/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=258669af. Accessed 5 Dec. 2024.