Who Owns the Future? From Artificial Intelligence to Abundant Imagination

Monday, March 31, 2025
McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall
Rice University, 6100 Main St, Houston, TX 77005

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. In 2024, she was awarded  a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship. 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.”

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. Ruha 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.