Who Owns the Future?
From Artificial Intelligence to Abundant Imagination
In this talk, Ruha Benjamin takes us into the liberating power of the imagination. Deadly systems shaped by white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, colonialism, and eugenics all emerged from the human imagination, and have real-world, often deadly impacts. To fight harmful systems and create a world in which everyone can thrive, we will have to imagine things differently. Drawing on work that critically examines tech-mediated inequities and engagement with grassroots approaches to viral justice, she offers a pragmatic and poetic approach to worldbuilding that invites each of us to consider the role we play in maintaining or transforming the oppressive status quo.
Ruha Benjamin, Professor, Department of African American Studies, Princeton University (and Founding Director, Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab)
Chair: Ann Mbuti
Biography
An enthralling storyteller, brilliant scholar, and fierce advocate for all things just, Dr. Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University where she studies the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, knowledge and power, race and citizenship, and health and justice. As the founding director of the IDA B. WELLS Just Data Lab, she brings together students, educators, activists, and artists to rethink and retool data for justice. Dr. Benjamin is the award winning author of Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, People’s Science: Bodies & Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier, and she recently released her fourth book, Imagination: A Manifesto. At the center of all Dr. Benjamin’s work is the invitation to “imagine and craft the worlds we cannot live without, just as we dismantle the ones we cannot live within.”
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.
Chair
Ann Mbuti (b. 1990) is a professor of process design and an independent writer specializing in contemporary art and pop culture. Her work focuses on artistic projects with the potential for social, political, or environmental change. She is currently exploring mythologies, oral history, science fiction, and the fusion of fact and fiction.