KINGSTON, R.I. – Feb. 19, 2024 – Ruha Benjamin, the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, will explore the topic of “Utopia, Dystopia or … Ustopia: Reckoning with the Future of Technology and Society,” at the University of Rhode Island on Thursday, Feb. 22, at 5 p.m.
In her lecture, which will be in the Hope Room of the Higgins Welcome Center on the Kingston Campus, Benjamin will use historical and sociological information to decode whether advancing technology will more closely resemble “The Matrix” or “The Jetsons.” The lecture is free and open to the public and will be livestreamed on Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Registration is required to attend the talk or receive a link to the livestream.
“I am excited to host an internationally recognized writer and speaker on campus to discuss the implications of technological advances on our society,” said Ammina Kothari, director of the Harrington School of Communication and Media. “While Dr. Benjamin’s studies involve complex issues, her work is very accessible and often comes with practical suggestions to address some of the inequities introduced by technological innovation.”
Benjamin’s work looks at the relationship between science, technology, medicine and society, addressing debates about how science and technology shape the world and how people can, should and do critically engage technoscience – as they face the knowledge that what may bring health and longevity to some may threaten the dignity and rights of others.
Her presentation at URI is important because there seem to be two camps: those who protest loss of privacy or built-in racism and those who regard new technology developments as keys to solving some of the world’s most difficult challenges.
Benjamin will introduce the audience to the world of biased tools, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements and provide tools to decode tech predictions with historical and sociological insight.
“How do we develop approaches to health and well-being that don’t simply substitute technological fixes for wider social change?,” she writes on her website. “Fixes that do more to widen the gross inequities that already stratify life chances? How do we advance life sciences without reinforcing popular conceptions of race … as biological? Gender… as destiny? Or disability … as tragic? After all, as we push the boundaries of the ‘human’ with science and technology, we are also reinforcing (and sometimes redrawing) social fault lines in often-unexpected ways.”
Benjamin is the founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and is a faculty associate for such programs at Princeton as the Center for Information Technology Policy, Center for Health and Wellbeing and the Program on Gender and Sexuality Studies.
She is the author of numerous papers and four books, including “Imagination: A Manifesto,” “Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want,” and “Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.”
The lecture is sponsored by the Harrington School of Communication and Media, Center for Computational Research, College of Arts and Sciences, Office of the Provost, College of Health Sciences, College of Pharmacy, College of Engineering, College of Business, and Department of Political Science.
This story was written by Hugh Markey.