Ruha Benjamin: "Beyond Buzzwords: Reimagining Responsibility in Digital Societies"

Academic lecture, Centre for Gender Studies in collaboration with the Responsible Digital Society Network

From automated decision systems in education, healthcare, policing and more, technologies have the potential to deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to harmful practices of a previous era. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with historical and sociological insight. When it comes to AI, Ruha shifts our focus from the dystopian and utopian narratives we are sold, to a sober reckoning with the way these tools are already a part of our lives. Whereas dystopias are the stuff of nightmares, and utopias the stuff of dreams… us-topias are what we create together when we are wide awake.

About the Speaker

Ruha Benjamin is 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 (2019), Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), and Imagination: A Manifesto (2024). Ruha earned a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College, MA and PhD in Sociology from UC Berkeley, and postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society & Genetics and Harvard’s Science, Technology & Society Program.  She is also the recipient of fellowships and awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, and President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. In 2024, Ruha was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship. For more info, visit ruhabenjamin.com.

Register by 18 October 2024: https://forms.gle/iL3UrtMQxLKQEzAz9

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