Event

 *Co-sponsored with the Penn Program on Race, Science and Society

Ruha Benjamin is an interdisciplinary scholar who examines the relationship between science, technology, medicine, and society. She is a professor of African American studies at Princeton University and is the author of People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (2013 Stanford University Press).

In this talk, Ruha will discuss her ongoing research on the way genomic science in different countries reflects, reinforces, and sometimes challenges racial and caste hierarchies. Drawing upon developments in Mexico, South Africa, and India, she finds the question of what the state owes particular groups increasingly connected to scientific definitions of what constitutes a group in the first place. And, ultimately, she argues that the epistemic and normative dexterity of the field — not its strict reinforcement of social hierarchy — is what makes it powerful, problematic, and for some, profitable.

Ruha received a Ph.D. in sociology at the University of California Berkeley and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics. She was an American Council of Learned Societies fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society Program and serves on the editorial board of the NYU book series “Biopolitics: Medicine, Technoscience, and Health in the Twenty-First Century.” For more info: www.ruhabenjamin.com