Ruha Benjamin

Why you should listen

Author, professor and sociologist Ruha Benjamin studies the social dimensions of science and technology. She is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, where she brings together students, educators, activists and artists to rethink and retool data for justice.

Benjamin is the award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want and the forthcoming book Imagination: A Manifesto, which will be published in February 2024. At the center of all her work is an invitation to imagine and craft the worlds we cannot live without, just as we dismantle the ones we cannot live within.