In Episode 141, Dan, Michael, and Dan’s doctoral students chat with Ruha Benjamin about her scholarship and new book, “Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.”

Books, Articles and Other Amazing Resources

1. Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the New Jim Code. John Wiley & Sons.
2. Dr. Benjamin mentioned books with “cousin concepts” such as:
   1. Noble, S. U. (2018). Algorithms of oppression: How search engines reinforce racism. NYU Press.
   2. Eubanks, V. (2018). Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and punish the poor. St. Martin’s Press.
   3. Broussard, M. (2018). Artificial unintelligence: How computers misunderstand the world. MIT Press.
3. Here’s a story on the Coalition to Stop the Cradle to Prison Algorithm
4. O’Neil, C. (2016). Weapons of math destruction: How big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Broadway Books.
5. Zuboff, S. (2019). The age of surveillance capitalism: The fight for a human future at the new frontier of power. Profile Books.
6. Buolamwini, J. A. (2017). Gender shades: intersectional phenotypic and demographic evaluation of face datasets and gender classifiers (Master’s thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
7. The Reset podcast by Vox has a podcast on how Google targeted vulnerable People of Color with gift cards titled, Hey Google: scan my race.
8. Benjamin, R. (2019). Assessing risk, automating racism. Science, 366(6464), 421-422.
9. For more on problems with surveillance via Amazon Ring see: Schuppe, J. (2019, August 8). Amazon is developing high-tech surveillance tools for an eager customer: America’s police. NBC News.
10. Here’s more on the story of Janet Vertesi trying to keep her pregnancy private: Naughton, J. (2014, May 10). Attempts to stay anonymous on the web will only put the NSA on your trail. The Guardian.
11. Check out Dr. Benjamin’s 2016 ISTE keynote given to edtech educators and her 2015 TEDxBaltimore Talk, From park bench to lab bench – What kind of future are we designing?

Biography

Ruha Benjamin is Associate Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. She specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and technology; race-ethnicity and gender; knowledge and power. She is author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013), Race After Technology (Polity 2019), and editor of Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life  (Duke University Press 2019), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. You can find more on her website at https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/ and follow her tweets @Ruha9.

Editor

We would like to thank (and participant) Zack Seitz of Wylie High School (TX) and the University of North Texas for his editing skills.