Race Unplugged: Moving Beyond Media Sound Bytes

College campuses are ground zero for racial misunderstanding, alienation, resentment, and violence—a place where many people are surprised to learn that hate crimes are common—alerting us to the fact that we urgently need new conceptual tools to understand and intervene upon the racial status quo. In her eye-opening lecture, Ruha Benjamin challenges contemporary race talk that often traffics in sound bytes, by showing how many of our relationships and institutions actually depend upon racial inequities, from healthcare to education, crime and punishment to entertainment. In so doing, she unpacks the “inconvenient facts” about racism in the United States with passion, candor, and reason. She also draws on firsthand experience in over twenty Asian, African, European, and Central American countries, to discuss how practices in the U.S. compare and contrast to other regions of the world.

Citizen Science 2.0

Are science and technology neutral? Or do they reflect and foster particular social values? What role, if any, should citizens have in shaping science and technology?Grounded in the heated battle over stem cell research in the United States, in this talk Ruha Benjamin highlights the voices of those who are typically “on the table, but not at the table”—people with disabilities, racial-ethnic minorities, members of the working class, and women—and asks us to consider whether citizens should have the power to influence science and technology as much as science and technology influence society.

Bio-Politics in the 21st Century

Designer Babies. Regenerative Medicine. DNA forensics. Genetic discrimination. Newborn Screening. Genetic Ancestry Testing. High-Tech Eugenics. Gender Testing. Cryopreservation. These and more comprise the landscape of the 21st century in which we are all ethical pioneers and biopolitical citizens. Using stem cell research as a window in to this exciting and disconcerting Brave New World, in this talk Ruha Benjamin moves us beyond the debates that devolve in to simple judgments—good or bad, life-saving medicine or bioethical nightmare, symbol of human ingenuity or our fall from grace—that too often ignore the people affected. Instead, Ruha moves the terms of discussion to focus on the shifting relationship between science and society, to the people who benefit—or don’t—from scientific innovation and what this says about our democratic commitments to an equitable society.

Imagine two women sitting in a waiting room -- one is a store clerk, and the other is an investment banker -- preparing to donate their eggs for a particular type of ...

... say about the person's willingness to sacrifice something in order to change a situation, observes Ruha Benjamin, professor of sociology at Boston University.

June 1, 2013 marked the first National Day of Civic Hacking. The organizers describe it as a time for 'creating, building, and inventing open source solutions to  ...