Ruha Benjamin | |
---|---|
Born | 1978 |
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 |
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 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 (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,among others,Essence Magazine, [8] LA Times, [9] Washington Post, [10] New York Times, [11] San Francisco Chronicle, [12] The Root, [13] Motherboard, [14] 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]
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 being 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 different experiences and cultures as being influential in her way of looking at the world. [27]
Benjamin received her Bachelor of Arts in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College,before going on to complete 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 2010-2014,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. [32]
Race After Technology won the 2020 Oliver Cox Cromwell Book Prize awarded by the American Sociological Association Section on Race &Ethnic Relations,2020 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Award for Nonfiction, [33] and Honorable Mention for the 2020 Communication,Information Technologies,and Media Sociology Book Award. [34] It was also selected by Fast Company as one of “8 Books on Technology You Should Read in 2020.” [35]
A review in The Nation noted that,“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.” [36]
In 2019,a book she edited,Captivating Technology:Reimagining Race,Carceral Technoscience,and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life was released by Duke University Press, [37] examining how carceral logics shape social life well beyond prisons and police.
Currently,Benjamin is 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, [38] 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 [39] and Center for Digital Humanities at the University of Princeton.
On 25 September 2020,Benjamin was named as one of the 25 members of the "Real Facebook Oversight Board",an independent monitoring group over Facebook. [40]
Benjamin is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Fund Freedom Scholar Award, [41] fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, [42] National Science Foundation,and Institute for Advanced Study,among others. [43] In 2017 she received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. [44]
Donna J. Haraway is an American professor emerita in the history of consciousness and feminist studies departments at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies. She has also contributed to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, and is a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics.
Racist rhetoric is distributed through computer-mediated means and includes some or all of the following characteristics: ideas of racial uniqueness, racist attitudes towards specific social categories, racist stereotypes, hate-speech, nationalism and common destiny, racial supremacy, superiority and separation, conceptions of racial otherness, and anti-establishment world-view. Racism online can have the same effects as offensive remarks made face-to-face.
Michelle Murphy is a Canadian academic. She is a Professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto and Director of the Technoscience Research Unit.
Nettrice R. Gaskins is an African-American digital artist, academic, cultural critic and advocate of STEAM fields. In her work, she explores "techno-vernacular creativity" and Afrofuturism.
Marie Gottschalk is an American political scientist and professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, known for her work on mass incarceration in the United States. Gottschalk is the author of The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America (2006) and Caught: the Prison State and the Lockdown of American Politics (2016). Her research investigates the origins of the carceral state in the United States, the critiques of the scope and size of the carceral network, and the intersections of the carceral state with race and economic inequality.
Algorithmic bias describes systematic and repeatable errors in a computer system that create "unfair" outcomes, such as "privileging" one category over another in ways different from the intended function of the algorithm.
Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism is a 2018 book by Safiya Umoja Noble in the fields of information science, machine learning, and human-computer interaction.
Carolyn Moxley Rouse is an American anthropologist, professor and filmmaker. She is Professor and Chair of the Department of Anthropology at Princeton University.
Adia Harvey Wingfield is a professor of sociology at Washington University in St. Louis and the 2018 President of Sociologists for Women in Society. She is the author of several books, including No More Invisible Man: Race and Gender in Men's Work, and articles in peer-reviewed journals including Social Problems, Gender & Society, and Ethnic and Racial Studies. She has lectured internationally on her research.
PredPol, Inc, now known as Geolitica, is a predictive policing company that attempts to predict property crimes using predictive analytics. PredPol is also the name of the software the company produces. PredPol began as a project of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and University of California, Los Angeles professor Jeff Brantingham. PredPol has produced a patented algorithm, which is based on a model used to predict earthquake aftershocks.
Vesla Mae Weaver is an American political scientist and author. She is a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of political science and sociology at Johns Hopkins University.
The Algorithmic Justice League (AJL) is a digital advocacy non-profit organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 2016 by computer scientist Joy Buolamwini, the AJL uses research, artwork, and policy advocacy to increase societal awareness regarding the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in society and the harms and biases that AI can pose to society. The AJL has engaged in a variety of open online seminars, media appearances, and tech advocacy initiatives to communicate information about bias in AI systems and promote industry and government action to mitigate against the creation and deployment of biased AI systems. In 2021, Fast Company named AJL as one of the 10 most innovative AI companies in the world.
Rashida Richardson is a visiting scholar at Rutgers Law School and the Rutgers Institute for Information Policy and the Law and an attorney advisor to the Federal Trade Commission. She is also an assistant professor of law and political science at the Northeastern University School of Law and the Northeastern University Department of Political Science in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities.
Inioluwa Deborah Raji is a Nigerian-Canadian computer scientist and activist who works on algorithmic bias, AI accountability, and algorithmic auditing. Raji has previously worked with Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and the Algorithmic Justice League on researching gender and racial bias in facial recognition technology. She has also worked with Google’s Ethical AI team and been a research fellow at the Partnership on AI and AI Now Institute at New York University working on how to operationalize ethical considerations in machine learning engineering practice. A current Mozilla fellow, she has been recognized by MIT Technology Review and Forbes as one of the world's top young innovators.
Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code is a 2019 American book focusing on a range of ways in which social hierarchies, particularly racism, are embedded in the logical layer of internet-based technologies. It won the 2020 Oliver Cox Cromwell Book Prize, 2020 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Award for Nonfiction, and Honorable Mention for the 2020 Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Book Award, and has been widely reviewed.
Virginia Eubanks is an American political scientist, professor, and author studying technology and social justice. She is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. Previously Eubanks was a Fellow at New America researching digital privacy, economic inequality, and data-based discrimination.
Tawana Petty is an American author, poet, social justice organizer, mother and youth advocate who works to counter systemic racism. Petty formerly served as Director of Policy and Advocacy for the Algorithmic Justice League representing AJL in national and international processes shaping AI governance.
Kishonna L. Gray is an American communication and gender studies researcher based at the University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences. Gray is best known for her research on technology, gaming, race, and gender. As an expert in Women's and Communication Studies, she has written several articles for publications such as the New York Times. In the academic year 2016–2017, she was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professors and Scholars Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hosted by the Department of Women's and Gender Studies and the MIT Comparative Media Studies/Writing Program. She has also been a faculty visitor at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and at Microsoft Research.
Reuben Jonathan Miller is an American writer, sociologist, criminologist and social worker from Chicago, Illinois. He teaches at the University of Chicago in the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice and in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. He is also a research professor at the American Bar Foundation.
Allison Koenecke is an American computer scientist and an assistant professor in the Department of Information Science at Cornell University. Her research considers computational social science and algorithmic fairness. In 2022, Koenecke was named one of the Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science.
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