Ruha Benjamin (born 1978) is a sociologist and a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.[1] She works on the relationship between innovation and equity, particularly the intersection of race, justice, and technology. Benjamin authored 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 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.[4]
In 2013, Benjamin's first book, People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier, was published by Stanford University Press.[5] In it, she critically investigates how innovation and design often builds upon or reinforces inequalities, including how and why scientific, commercial, and popular discourses and practices around genomics have incorporated racial-ethnic and gendered categories.[6]
In 2019, her book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code was published by Polity.[7] 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 adapted Michelle Alexander's work The New Jim Crow, to analyze how seemingly "neutral" algorithms and applications can replicate or worsen racial bias.[8]
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,[9] and Honorable Mention for the 2020 Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Book Award.[10]
Benjamin is a 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,[11] 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[12] and Center for Digital Humanities at the University of Princeton.
(As editor) Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life. Duke University Press. 2019. ISBN978-1-4780-0381-6.
(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). "Informed Refusal: Toward a Justice-based Bioethics". Science, Technology, and Human Values, Vol. 4, Issue 6: 967–990.[22]
(2016). "Catching Our Breath: Critical Race STS and the Carceral Imagination". Engaging Science, Technology and Society, Vol. 2: 145–156.[23]
(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.[24]
(2018). "Black Afterlives Matter: Cultivating Kinfulness as Reproductive Justice". In Making Kin Not Population, edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway. Prickly Paradigm Press.[25] (Republished in Boston Review[26])
(2018). "Prophets and Profits of Racial Science". Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies, Vol. 5, Issue 1: 41–53.[27]
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