Lowell Lecture
Ruha Benjamin: Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code
Date & Time
March 24, 2022 at 7 p.m.
Location
Virtual
, MA
Driving Directions
Speaker(s)
Ruha Benjamin
Presenting Organization
Topics
Contact
Chandler Shaw (shawcp@bc.edu, )
Ruha Benjamin is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Founding Director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code among many other publications. Her work investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, knowledge and power. Benjamin earned a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College, MA and PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society & Genetics and Harvard’s Science, Technology & Society Program. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Marguerite Casey Foundation 2020 Freedom Scholar Award, and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton.
Ruha Benjamin will give a lecture based on her book Race After Technology, which will be followed by an audience Q&A. Of Race After Technology, Wiley writes: “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.”
Presented by the Park Street Corporation Speaker Series and cosponsored by the Lowell Humanities Series and the Schiller Institute for Integrated Science and Society.