Ruha Benjamin's Website
---------------------------------------------------Benjamin, Ruha. "A Lab of Their Own: Genomic sovereignty as postcolonial science policy." Policy & Society 28.4 (2009): 341-355.
---. "Cultura Obscura: Race, Power, and 'Culture Talk' in the Health Sciences." American Journal of Law and Medicine 43 (2017): 225-238.
---, ed. Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life. Duke University Press, 2019: 1-22.
---. "Ferguson is the Future." Data Society (June 2018): 1-21.
---. "Informed Refusal: Toward a Justice-based Bioethics." Science, Technology, & Human Values (2016): 1-24.
---. "Innovating inequity: If race is a technology, postracialism is the genius bar." Ethnic and Racial Studies (July 15, 2016): 1-8.
---. "Interrogating Equity: A Disability Justice Approach to Genetic Engineering." Issues in Science and Technology (Spring 2016): 1-4. ["My approach to human genetic engineering draws on 10 years of research on the social impact and meaning of emerging biotechnologies, in particular regenerative medicine and genomics, in which I have examined the relationship between innovation and equity as it connects to socioeconomic class, gender, race and ethnicity, citizenship, and disability. In what follows, I will focus primarily on disability with the understanding that these forms of social stratification, and their intersection with science and technology, are inextricably connected. With that, my intervention is twofold."]
---. "The New Artificial Intelligentsia." Los Angeles Review of Books (October 18, 2024) ["Behind this duplicity lies a familiar calculus: if AI evangelists can convince us that AGI is possible, imminent, and dangerous, we might be compelled to entrust our fate to them. Hype and doom, in other words, are two sides of the same (bit)coin. “AI safety” principles, teams, and initiatives are proliferating in part to hoard power and resources and, ultimately, to engineer the future in their own image. The aim: To lull us into acquiescence so that they can carry on business as usual. I have analyzed elsewhere the harmful impacts of AI. In the rest of this essay, I focus on AI’s insidious inputs—the eugenic values and logics of those who create these systems, cloaking them in the rhetoric of salvation. Breathless buzzwords like “efficiency,” “novelty,” and “productivity” conceal a self-serving vision: the future imagined by AI evangelists is meant only for a small sliver of humanity. The rest of us will be left clamoring to survive on a boiling planet. Take the autonomous weapons systems raining hell on Palestinians—why else give them saccharine-sounding names like Lavender and the Gospel if not to make these deadly inventions seem benevolent? If we listen carefully to the good word of tech evangelists, we can hear the groans of those buried under the rubble of progress. Many of the same people behind the technologies wreaking havoc today—workplace algorithms intensifying the pace of work, facial recognition software leading to false arrests, automated triage systems rationing quality healthcare, and “smart” weapons ripping through flesh with a click—also brand themselves as humanity’s saviors. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pronounced that “it is a golden age. […] We are now solving problems with machine learning and artificial intelligence that were … in the realm of science fiction for the last several decades.” In a 2015 essay for an interfaith magazine, PayPal and surveillance tech firm Palantir Technologies co-founder Peter Thiel argued, Science and technology are natural allies to this Judeo-Western optimism, especially if we remain open to an eschatological frame in which God works through us in building the kingdom of heaven today, here on Earth—in which the kingdom of heaven is both a future reality and something partially achievable in the present. Likewise, the home page of Singularity University, a company founded by Ray Kurzweil and Peter Diamandis, affirms the organization’s belief that “technology and entrepreneurship can solve the world’s greatest challenges.” As a group, the artificial intelligentsia promises to guide us into the Future™, positioning themselves as Guardians of the Galaxy, even as they engineer the crises against which we must guard."]
---. People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier. Stanford University Press, 2013. ["Stem cell research has sparked controversy and heated debate since the first human stem cell line was derived in 1998. Too frequently these debates devolve to simple judgments—good or bad, life-saving medicine or bioethical nightmare, symbol of human ingenuity or our fall from grace—ignoring the people affected. With this book, Ruha Benjamin moves the terms of debate to focus on the shifting relationship between science and society, on the people who benefit—or don’t—from regenerative medicine and what this says about our democratic commitments to an equitable society. People’s Science uncovers the tension between scientific innovation and social equality, taking the reader inside California’s 2004 stem cell initiative, the first of many state referenda on scientific research, to consider the lives it has affected. Benjamin reveals the promise and peril of public participation in science, illuminating issues of race, disability, gender, and socio-economic class that serve to define certain groups as more or less deserving in their political aims and biomedical hopes. Ultimately, Ruha Benjamin argues that without more deliberate consideration about how scientific initiatives can and should reflect a wider array of social concerns, stem cell research—from African Americans’ struggle with sickle cell treatment to the recruitment of women as tissue donors—still risks excluding many. Even as regenerative medicine is described as a participatory science for the people, Benjamin asks us to consider if “the people” ultimately reflects our democratic ideals."]
---. People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier. Stanford University Press, 2013. ["Stem cell research has sparked controversy and heated debate since the first human stem cell line was derived in 1998. Too frequently these debates devolve to simple judgments—good or bad, life-saving medicine or bioethical nightmare, symbol of human ingenuity or our fall from grace—ignoring the people affected. With this book, Ruha Benjamin moves the terms of debate to focus on the shifting relationship between science and society, on the people who benefit—or don’t—from regenerative medicine and what this says about our democratic commitments to an equitable society. People’s Science uncovers the tension between scientific innovation and social equality, taking the reader inside California’s 2004 stem cell initiative, the first of many state referenda on scientific research, to consider the lives it has affected. Benjamin reveals the promise and peril of public participation in science, illuminating issues of race, disability, gender, and socio-economic class that serve to define certain groups as more or less deserving in their political aims and biomedical hopes. Ultimately, Ruha Benjamin argues that without more deliberate consideration about how scientific initiatives can and should reflect a wider array of social concerns, stem cell research—from African Americans’ struggle with sickle cell treatment to the recruitment of women as tissue donors—still risks excluding many. Even as regenerative medicine is described as a participatory science for the people, Benjamin asks us to consider if “the people” ultimately reflects our democratic ideals."]
---. "Race After Technology." Data After Society (November 26, 2019) ["Ruha Benjamin discusses the relationship between machine bias and systemic racism, analyzing specific cases of “discriminatory design” and offering tools for a socially-conscious approach to tech development. In "Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code," Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype, from everyday apps to complex algorithms, to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. 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."]
---. Race After Technology: Abolitionists Tools for the New Jim Code. Wiley, 2019.
---. "Race for Cures: Rethinking the Racial Logics of ‘Trust’ in Biomedicine." Sociology Compass 8.6 (2014): 755 - 769.
---. "Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods." Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2.2 (2016): 1-28.
---. "The Social Dimensions of Science, Technology and Medicine." Northwestern Digital Learning Project #12 (June 5, 2019)
---. Race After Technology: Abolitionists Tools for the New Jim Code. Wiley, 2019.
---. "Race for Cures: Rethinking the Racial Logics of ‘Trust’ in Biomedicine." Sociology Compass 8.6 (2014): 755 - 769.
---. "Racial Fictions, Biological Facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through Speculative Methods." Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2.2 (2016): 1-28.
---. "The Social Dimensions of Science, Technology and Medicine." Northwestern Digital Learning Project #12 (June 5, 2019)
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