Ruha Benjamin
About Ruha Benjamin
Speech topics
Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want
If the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that something almost undetectable can be deadly, and that we can transmit it without even knowing. Doesn’t this imply that small things, seemingly minor actions, decisions, and habits could have exponential effects in the other direction, tipping the scales toward justice: affirming life, fostering well-being, and invigorating society? In this talk, Ruha Benjamin introduces a micro-vision of change—a way of looking at the everyday ways people are working to combat unjust systems and build alternatives to the oppressive status quo. Born of a stubborn hopefulness and grounded in social analysis, she offers a pragmatic and poetic approach to fostering a more just and joyful world.
Speaking videos
Media coverage
How emerging technologies amplify racism—even when they're ...
Ruha Benjamin's book, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, explains how even attempts to address racial bias can actually amplify ...
In video chats, familiar forms of online harassment make a comeback
Ruha Benjamin and her husband, Shawn, were reading books to children stuck at home using Zoom's videoconferencing tool last week when a racist troll ...
Ruha Benjamin on deep learning: Computational depth without ...
Alongside deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, Benjamin was a keynote speaker this week at the all-digital International Conference on Learning ...
The power of prejudice -- and why you should speak up - CNN.com
... say about the person's willingness to sacrifice something in order to change a situation, observes Ruha Benjamin, professor of sociology at Boston University.
Books by Ruha Benjamin
“Imagination: A Manifesto ” (2024)
Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short)
“Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want” (2022)
Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want
“Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code” (2019)
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. If you adopt this book for classroom use in the 2019-2020 academic year, the author would be pleased to arrange to Skype to a session of your class. If interested, enter your details in this sign-up sheet: https://buff.ly/2wJsvZr
“Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life” (2019)
The contributors to Captivating Technology examine how carceral technologies such as electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms are being deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be appropriated and reimagined for more liberatory ends.
“People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier” (2013)
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