UK Libraries Welcomes Princeton Scholar Ruha Benjamin for Fall Lecture UK Libraries
"Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code" is a lecture presented by Princeton University Professor Ruha Benjamin.
About this event
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and even deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era.
In this talk, Benjamin presents the concept of the “New Jim Code" to explore a range of discriminatory designs that 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. Benjamin will help the audience consider how race itself is a kind of tool designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice and discuss how technology is and can be used toward liberatory ends.
Hosted by University of Kentucky Libraries, this presentation takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold, but also the ones we manufacture ourselves.
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Ruha Benjamin is a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University and founding director of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab. Her work focuses on the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine. Benjamin has written or edited three books, and is currently working on a fourth, titled Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want.
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