The Harold and Iris Chandler Lecture Presents Dr. Ruha Benjamin: "Race to the Future? Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology & Society"

Thursday, November 2, 2023 7:30 pm to 9 pm

Mills Hall Event Space, VAC - Visual Arts Center, Kresge Auditorium

***Please note that this lecture takes place in the Mills Hall Event Space***

From automated decision systems in healthcare, policing, education and more, technologies have the potential to deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to harmful practices of a previous era. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech predictions with historical and sociological insight. When it comes to AI, Ruha shifts our focus from the dystopian and utopian narratives we are sold, to a sober reckoning with the way these tools are already a part of our lives. Whereas dystopias are the stuff of nightmares, and utopias the stuff of dreams…utopias are what we create together when we are wide awake.

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 author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, among many other publications. Her work investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, knowledge and power. She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award and the President's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. Her most recent book, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, winner of the 2023 Stowe Prize, was born out of the twin plagues of COVID-19 and police violence and offers a practical and principled approach to transforming our communities and helping us build a more just and joyful world.

After the lecture, Professor Benjamin will be available for a book signing.

To view a live-stream of this talk, please visit the Bowdoin Talks website.

Sponsored by the Harold and Iris Chandler Lectureship Fund.

Free and open to the public.

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