In preparation for Ruha Benjamin’s visit to Loyola Marymount University as part of the 2024 Bellarmine Forum on September 26, Nicole Murph, reference and instruction librarian, has compiled the following recommended resources list. More information about the author and the event can be found on the Bellarmine Forum website.
Recommended Resources
Benjamin, R. (2013). People’s science: Bodies and rights on the stem cell frontier. Stanford University Press.
Stem cell research has sparked controversy and heated debate since the first human stem cell line was derived in 1998. Too frequently these debates devolve to simple judgments-good or bad, life-saving medicine or bioethical nightmare, symbol of human ingenuity or our fall from grace-ignoring the people affected. Ruha Benjamin moves the terms of debate to focus on the shifting relationship between science and society, on the people who benefit-or don’t-from regenerative medicine and what this says about our democratic commitments to an equitable society.
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race after technology: Abolitionist tools for the new Jim Code. Polity.
Cutting through tech-industry hype, this book explores how emerging technologies reinforce white supremacy. Conceptualizing the “New Jim Code,” Benjamin shows how discriminatory designs can encode inequity and also makes a case for race itself as a kind of tool designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice.
Benjamin, R. (Ed.). (2019). Captivating technology: Race, carceral technoscience, and liberatory imagination in everyday life. Duke University Press.
The contributors to “Captivating Technology“ examine how carceral technologies such as electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms are being deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be appropriated and reimagined for more liberatory ends.
Benjamin, R. (2022). Viral justice: How we grow the world we want. Princeton University Press.
Long before the pandemic, Benjamin was doing groundbreaking research on race, technology, and justice, focusing on big, structural changes. The twin plagues of COVID-19 and anti-Black police violence inspired her to rethink the importance of small, individual actions. Here she explores how we can transform society through the choices we make every day. Benjamin shows how seemingly minor decisions and habits could spread virally and have exponentially positive effects. She introduces us to community organizers who are fostering mutual aid and collective healing.
Benjamin, R. (2024). Imagination: A manifesto. W.W. Norton & Company.
In this work, Ruha Benjamin calls on us to take imagination seriously as a site of struggle and a place of possibility for reshaping the future. Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University professor, insists that imagination isn’t a luxury. It is a vital resource and powerful tool for collective liberation. “Imagination: A Manifesto“ is her proclamation that we have the power to use our imaginations to challenge systems of oppression and to create a world in which everyone can thrive. But obstacles abound. We have inherited destructive ideas that trap us inside a dominant imagination. Consider how racism, sexism, and classism make hierarchies, exploitation, and violence seem natural and inevitable–but all emerged from the human imagination. The most effective way to disrupt these deadly systems is to do so collectively. Benjamin highlights the educators, artists, activists, and many others who are refuting powerful narratives that justify the status quo, crafting new stories that reflect our interconnection, and offering creative approaches to seemingly intractable problems.
Butler, O. (1988). Kindred. Beacon Press.
The visionary time-travel classic whose Black female hero is pulled through time to face the horrors of American slavery and explores the impacts of racism, sexism, and white supremacy then and now. Blazing the trail for neo-slavery narratives like Colson Whitehead’s “The Underground Railroad” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Water Dancer,” Butler takes one of speculative fiction’s oldest tropes and infuses it with lasting depth and power. Dana not only experiences the cruelties of slavery on her skin but also grimly learns to accept it as a condition of her own existence in the present. “Where stories about American slavery are often gratuitous, reducing its horror to explicit violence and brutality, ‘Kindred’ is controlled and precise” (New York Times).
Davis, A. Y. (2012). The meaning of freedom: And other difficult dialogues. City Lights Books.
In this collection of twelve previously unpublished speeches, Davis confronts the interconnected issues of power, race, gender, class, incarceration, conservatism, and the ongoing need for social change in the United States.
Davis, A. Y. (2016). Freedom is a constant struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the foundations of a movement. Haymarket Books.
In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today’s struggles, Davis discusses the legacies of previous liberation struggles, from the Black Freedom Movement to the South African anti-Apartheid movement. She highlights connections and analyzes today’s struggles against state terror, from Ferguson to Palestine. Facing a world of outrageous injustice, Davis challenges us to imagine and build the movement for human liberation. And in doing so, she reminds us that “Freedom is a constant struggle.”
D’Ignazio, C. & Klein, L.F. (2020). Data feminism. The MIT Press.
A new way of thinking about data science and data ethics that is informed by the ideas of intersectional feminism. Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind? The narratives around big data and data science are overwhelmingly white, male, and techno-heroic. In “Data Feminism”, Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein present a new way of thinking about data science and data ethics–one that is informed by intersectional feminist thought. Illustrating data feminism in action, D’Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems.
Ehlers, N. & Hinkson, L.R. (Eds.). (2017). Subprime health: Debt and race in U.S. medicine. University of Minnesota Press.
From race-based pharmaceutical prescriptions and marketing, to race-targeted medical “hot spotting” and the Affordable Care Act, to stem-cell trial recruitment discourse, Subprime Health is a timely examination of race-based medicine as it intersects with the concept of debt.
hooks, b. (2000). Where we stand: Class matters. Routledge.
Drawing on both her roots in Kentucky and her adventures with Manhattan Coop boards, “Where We Stand” is a successful black woman’s reflection–personal, straight forward, and rigorously honest–on how our dilemmas of class and race are intertwined, and how we can find ways to think beyond them.
hooks, b. (2001). All about love: New visions. Perennial.
Presenting radical new ways to think about love, the author examines the role of love in our personal and professional lives and how it can be used to end struggles between individuals, communities, and societies.
Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding sweetgrass: Indigenous, wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Milkweed Editions.
As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer has been trained to ask questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two ways of knowledge together. Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings – asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass – offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgment and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
Klein, N. (2007). The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt.
Journalist Klein introduced the term “disaster capitalism.” Whether covering Baghdad after the U.S. occupation, Sri Lanka after the tsunami, or New Orleans post-Katrina, she witnessed remarkably similar events: people still reeling were hit again, this time with economic “shock treatment,” losing their land and homes to corporate makeovers. This book retells the story of Milton Friedman’s free-market economic revolution. In contrast to the myth of this movement’s peaceful global victory, Klein shows how it has exploited moments of shock and extreme violence in order to implement its economic policies. At its the core is the use of cataclysmic events to advance radical privatization combined with the privatization of the disaster response itself. Klein argues that by capitalizing on crises, created by nature or war, the disaster capitalism complex now exists as a booming new economy, the violent culmination of a radical economic project that has been incubating for fifty years.
Klein, N. (2014). This changes everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. Alfred A. Knopf Canada.
“This Changes Everything” is a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems.
McGhee, H. (2021). The sum of us: What racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together. One World.
Heather C. McGhee’s specialty is the American economy–and the mystery of why it so often fails the American public. As she dug into subject after subject, from the financial crisis to declining wages to collapsing public infrastructure, she found a common problem at the bottom of them all: racism–but not just in the obvious ways that hurt people of color. Racism has costs for white people, too. It is at the core of the dysfunction of our democracy and even the spiritual and moral crises that grip us. Racism is a toxin in the American body and it weakens us all. But how did this happen? And is there a way out? To find the way, McGhee embarks on a deeply personal journey across the country from Mississippi to Maine, tallying up what we lose when we buy into the zero-sum paradigm–the idea that progress for some of us must come at the expense of others. This is the story of how public goods in this country–from parks and pools to functioning schools–have become private luxuries; of how unions collapsed, wages stagnated, and inequality increased; and of how this country, unique among the world’s advanced economies, has thwarted universal healthcare. It’s why we fail to prevent environmental and public health crises that require collective action. But in unlikely places of worship and work, McGhee also finds proof of what she calls the Solidarity Dividend: gains that come when people come together across race, to the benefit of all involved.
Mejias, U.A. & Couldry, N. (2024). Data grab: The new colonialism of Big Tech and how to fight back. The University of Chicago Press.
In the present day, Big Tech is extracting resources from us, transferring and centralizing resources from people to companies. These companies are grabbing our most basic natural resources — our data — exploiting our labor and connections, and repackaging our information to control our views, track our movements, record our conversations, and discriminate against us. These companies tell us this is for our own good, to build innovation and develop new technology. But in fact every time we unthinkingly click “Accept” on a set of Terms and Conditions, we allow our most personal information to be kept indefinitely, repackaged by companies to control and exploit us for their own profit. Mejias and Couldry explain why postindustrial capitalism cannot be understood without colonialism, and why race is a critical factor in who benefits from data colonialism, just as it was for historic colonialism.
Morrison, T. (2019). The source of self-regard: Selected essays, speeches, and meditations. Alfred A. Knopf.
In the writings and speeches included here, Morrison takes on contested social issues: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, “black matter(s) and human rights. She looks at enduring aspects of culture: the role of the artist in society, the literary imagination, the Afro-American presence in American literature, and, in her Nobel lecture, the power of language itself. And here too is piercing commentary on her own work (including The Bluest Eye, Sala, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, and Paradise) and that of others, among them painter and collagist Romare Bearden, author Toni Cade Bambara, and theater director Peter Sellars. In all, “The Source of Self-Regard” is a luminous and essential addition to Toni Morrison’s oeuvre.
Moskowitz, P. (2017). How to kill a city: Gentrification, inequality, and the fight for the neighborhood. Nation Books.
The term gentrification has become a buzzword to describe the changes in urban neighborhoods across the country, but we don’t realize just how threatening it is. It means more than the arrival of trendy shops, much-maligned hipsters, and expensive lattes. The very future of American cities as vibrant, equitable spaces hangs in the balance. Peter Moskowitz takes readers from the kitchen tables of hurting families who can no longer afford their homes to the corporate boardrooms and political backrooms where destructive housing policies are devised. Along the way, Moskowitz uncovers the massive, systemic forces behind gentrification in New Orleans, Detroit, San Francisco, and New York. The deceptively simple question of who can and cannot afford to pay the rent goes to the heart of America’s crises of race and inequality.
Schulman, S. (2012). The gentrification of the mind: Witness to a lost imagination. University of California Press.
In this gripping memoir of the AIDS years (1981–1996), Sarah Schulman recalls how much of the rebellious queer culture, cheap rents, and a vibrant downtown arts movement vanished almost overnight to be replaced by gay conservative spokespeople and mainstream consumerism. Schulman takes us back to her Lower East Side and brings it to life, filling these pages with vivid memories of her avant-garde queer friends and dramatically recreating the early years of the AIDS crisis as experienced by a political insider. Interweaving personal reminiscence with cogent analysis, Schulman details her experience as a witness to the loss of a generation’s imagination and the consequences of that loss.
About the Author
Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American studies at Princeton University where she specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and social inequity. She is author of four books, including “Imagination: A Manifesto” (Norton 2024), “Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want” (Princeton University Press 2022), winner of the 2023 Stowe Prize, “Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code” (Polity 2019), winner of the 2020 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award for antiracist scholarship and the 2020 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction, “People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier” (Stanford University Press 2013), and editor of “Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life” (Duke University Press 2019).
Professor Benjamin received her BA in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College, MA and PhD in sociology from UC Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics and Harvard University’s Science, Technology, and Society Program. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and Institute for Advanced Study. In 2017, she received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton and, in 2020, the Marguerite Casey Foundation Inaugural Freedom Scholar Award.