Ruha Benjamin is a sociologist and an Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. The primary focus of her work is the relationship between innovation and equity, particularly focusing on 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 and Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Benjamin is also a prominent public intellectual, having spoken at TedxBaltimore, blogged at The Huffington Post, and co-organized Black to the Future: An Imagination Incubator.
Early life
Benjamin describes her interest in the relationship between science, technology and medicine as being prompted by her early life. She was born in a clinic in Wai, India. Hearing her parents' stories about the interaction of human bodies with medical technology in the clinic sparked her interest. 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 different experiences and cultures as being influential in her way of looking at the world.
Career
Benjamin received her B.A. in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College, before going on to complete her Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California Berkeley in 2008. She completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University’s Science, Technology, and Society Program. In 2013, Benjamin's first book, People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier was published by Stanford University Press. 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. In 2019, her book, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code was published by Polity. 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. In 2019, a book she edited, Captivating Technology: Reimagining Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life was released by Duke University Press, examining how carceral logics shape social life well beyond prisons and police. Currently, Benjamin is Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University where her work focuses on dimensions of science, technology, and medicine, race and citizenship, knowledge and power. In 2018, she founded the JUST DATA Lab, 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 and Center for Digital Humanities at the University of Princeton.
