Ruha Benjamin will give the Spring 2020 Critical Data Studies Distinguished Lecture \u201cRace After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code\u201d at 5:30-7 p.m. Feb. 17 in Stewart Center\u2019s Fowler Hall. The hourlong talk will be followed by a half-hour Q&A with the audience. The event is free and open to the public.<\/p>\n
Benjamin<\/a> is a professor of African American studies and founder of the JUST DATA Lab at Princeton University. She is the author of \u201cRace After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code\u201d (Polity) and \u201cPeople\u2019s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier\u201d (Stanford University Press), as well as the editor of \u201cCaptivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life\u201d (Duke University Press).<\/p>\n In her talk, Benjamin takes listeners into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, she challenges listeners to question not only the technologies being sold to them, but also the ones they manufacture themselves. Benjamin presents the concept of the \u201cNew Jim Code\u201d to explore a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity: by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies, by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions, or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. She asks listeners to consider how race itself is a kind of tool designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice and discuss how technology is and can be used toward liberatory ends.<\/p>\n The Spring 2020 Critical Data Studies Distinguished lecture is organized by the Critical Data Studies Collective at Purdue in partnership with the Purdue University Libraries and School of Information Studies, School of Interdisciplinary Studies, Division of Diversity and Inclusion, DiversiKey, African American Studies and Research Center, NSF Center for the Science of Information, The Data Mine and Women\u2019s, Gender and Sexuality Studies.<\/p>\n