Utopia, Dystopia or Ustopia? A New Equations talk with Ruha Benjamin

For “Utopia, Dystopia or Ustopia? Reckoning with the Future of Science, Technology & Society,” Princeton author and professor Ruha Benjamin takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms and their many entanglements, while providing conceptual tools to decode tech promises with historical and sociological insight.

About Our Fall 2023 Speaker

Ruha Benjamin is Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019) and Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), 2023 winner of the Stowe Prize, 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. 

Ruha earned her BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College, MA and Ph.D. 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 Freedom Scholar Award and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton.

Her work is published in numerous journals, including Science, Technology, and Human Values; Policy & Society; Ethnicity & Health; and the Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science and reported on in national and international news outlets, including NBC News, Fast Company, WIRED, Slate Magazine, CBC, CNET, The Guardian, National Geographic and Nature.