Ruha Benjamin

Ruha Benjamin (born 1978) is a sociologist and professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. 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).

In 2024, she was named a MacArthur fellow.

Early life

Benjamin was born to an African-American father and a mother of Indian and Persian descent. She describes her interest in the relationship between science, technology, and medicine as prompted by her early life. She was born in Wai, Maharashtra, India. She has lived and spent time in South Central Los Angeles; Conway, South Carolina; Majuro, South Pacific, and Swaziland, Southern Africa.

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.

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, including how and why scientific, commercial, and popular discourses and practices around genomics have incorporated racial-ethnic and gendered categories.

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 adapted Michelle Alexander's work ''The New Jim Crow'', to analyze how seemingly "neutral" algorithms and applications can replicate or worsen racial bias.

''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, and Honorable Mention for the 2020 Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Book Award.

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, 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 Princeton University.

On September 25, 2020, Benjamin was named as one of the 25 members of the so-called "Real Facebook Oversight Board", an independent monitoring group over Facebook.

Allegations of antisemitism

In December 2024, Benjamin spoke at a gathering of the National Association of Independent Schools, where representatives from 60 Jewish schools were in attendance; her remarks were condemned as antisemitic by Zionist groups who controversially equate criticism of the state of Israel with anti-Jewish racism, despite Benjamin not mentioning Jews or Israel in her remarks at the conference. A student in attendance described her remarks as "allud ngto Israelis – Jews – as genocidal,  and portray ngthem as immoral beings, who ethnic cleanse, and annihilate an entire people.' She implied that Israelis lack humanity, that they are individuals who do not believe in the 'seemingly radical notion that all life is sacred.'" Several high school students in attendance allegedly felt unsafe, and one student reportedly said they "felt so targeted, so unsafe, that we tucked our Magen Davids ewish stars, a historic symbol of Jewish peoplehoodin our shirts and walked out as those around us glared and whispered."

In response to the criticism, the head of the NAIS issued an apology and said, "There is no place for antisemitism at NAIS events, in our member schools, or in society."

Honors and awards

Benjamin is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Fund Freedom Scholar Award and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, and Institute for Advanced Study. In 2017 she received the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. In 2024, Benjamin was named a MacArthur Fellow.

On April 11, 2024, at Spelman College's Founders Day Convocation, she received an honorary Doctor of Science degree.

Publications

Books

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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.
* (2016). "Informed Refusal: Toward a Justice-based Bioethics". ''Science, Technology, and Human Values'', Vol. 4, Issue 6: 967–990.
* (2016). "Catching Our Breath: Critical Race STS and the Carceral Imagination". ''Engaging Science, Technology and Society'', Vol. 2: 145–156.
* (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.
* (2018). "Black Afterlives Matter: Cultivating Kinfulness as Reproductive Justice". In ''Making Kin Not Population'', edited by Adele Clarke and Donna Haraway. Prickly Paradigm Press. (Republished in ''Boston Review'')
* (2018). "Prophets and Profits of Racial Science". ''Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies'', Vol. 5, Issue 1: 41–53.
* (2019). "Assessing Risk, Automating Racism". ''Science'', Vol. 366, Issue 6464, pp. 421–422.

References

External links

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Introducing the 2020 Freedom Scholars

2021 AAAS Plenary Lecture


8th Annual Patrusky Lecture



# [https://www.oprah.com/app/invisible-portraits.html Dr. Ruha Benjamin is featured in the documentary focused on Black women, entitled “(In)visible Portraits;” directed by Oge Egbuonu, to debut on OWN Network]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Benjamin, Ruha
Living people
1978 births
American sociologists
American women sociologists
Black studies scholars
[ ategory:Medical sociologists
People from Satara district
Princeton University faculty
Sociologists of science
Spelman College alumni
UC Berkeley College of Letters and Science alumni
University of California, Los Angeles alumni
MacArthur Fellows