The Office of Public Scholarship is pleased to celebrate its elevation to the Office of the Provost with a lecture by MacArthur Fellow Ruha Benjamin. In this lecture, Dr. Benjamin will take a transdisciplinary approach to public scholarship, inviting us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and providing conceptual tools to decode tech predictions with historical and sociological insight.
Dr. Benjamin’s new book, Imagination: A Manifesto, will be available for purchase and signing following the lecture. The lecture will take place at 5 PM and the book signing will begin at 6 PM.
Dr. Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, and she recently released her fourth book, Imagination: A Manifesto. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton, and in 2024 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship.
This lecture is made possible by the William C. Ferguson fund and is co-sponsored by the Department of English and the Department of Sociology.