Ruha Benjamin

Ruha Benjamin is a sociologist and writer who studies how science, medicine and technology can reproduce or challenge social inequality. She is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, the founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and the author of Race After Technology (2019), Viral Justice (2022) and Imagination: A Manifesto (2024). In 2024 she was named a MacArthur Fellow.

Benjamin earned a bachelor's degree in sociology and anthropology at Spelman College and a PhD in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. After a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics and a visiting fellowship in Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology and Society program, she taught African American studies and sociology at Boston University before joining Princeton. She founded the Just Data Lab in 2018 as a space where activists, technologists and artists rethink how data can serve justice.

Her first book, People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013), examined the politics of publicly funded stem cell research in the United States and who benefits from it. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, published by Polity, introduced the phrase "the New Jim Code," adapted from Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, to describe how algorithms and apps presented as neutral can repeat or deepen racial bias. It won the Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Prize from the American Sociological Association's Section on Race and Ethnic Relations and the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction. She also edited the collection Captivating Technology (2019).

Her later books are Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), from Princeton University Press, and Imagination: A Manifesto (2024), from W. W. Norton. Benjamin also writes essays and forewords, including "The New Artificial Intelligentsia" (2024) in the Los Angeles Review of Books, a critique of the people promoting artificial intelligence, and she describes herself as a transdisciplinary scholar, writer and educator.

Benjamin combines academic rigor with public accessibility. Her writing is characterized by careful analysis of how technology intersects with social structures. She excels at making complex academic concepts accessible to broader audiences.

Start from a question about power: who designs a technology or system, who benefits and who bears the cost. Benjamin's writing moves between research and lived experience, so gather both the data and the stories, including your own observations, and put them side by side. Name the pattern you see with a short, memorable phrase, and use it consistently so readers can carry the idea with them.

Write for the public without dropping the rigor. Cite your sources, but explain them in plain language. Vary your rhythm: build a long, detailed sentence, then cut it off with a fragment that delivers the point. Use irony and rhetorical questions to expose claims that are presented as neutral or inevitable, and end by pointing toward alternatives, since her work insists that imagining a better arrangement is part of the analysis.