'Not All Speed is Movement': Innovation, Inequity, and Imagination in the 21st Century

Denison University’s Laura C. Harris Series welcomes Ruha Benjamin presenting a lecture, “Not All Speed is Movement”: Innovation, Inequity, and Imagination in the 21st Century.

A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Naïve. Work that doesn’t drive us into the grave? Impossible. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. Exactly. In this talk, Benjamin takes us into the liberating power of the imagination. Deadly systems shaped by white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and eugenics emerged from the human imagination, and have real-world, often deadly impacts. To fight oppressive systems and create a world in which everyone can thrive, we will have to imagine things differently. Drawing on work that critically examines tech-mediated inequities, what she terms the New Jim Code, and her engagement with grassroots approaches to viral justice, she offers a pragmatic and poetic approach to feminist futures that invites us to ask: are we our descendants’ wildest dreams?

Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), the 2023 winner of the Stowe Prize, and Imagination: A Manifesto (2024), among many other publications. Her work investigates the social dimensions of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and inequity, health and justice, and knowledge and power. She recently released her fourth book, Imagination: A Manifesto. At the center of all Benjamin’s work is the invitation to “imagine and craft the worlds we cannot live without, just as we dismantle the ones we cannot live within.”

Benjamin earned her Bachelor of Arts in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College, Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology from UC Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA’s Institute for Society & Genetics and Harvard’s Science, Technology & Society Program. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. In 2024 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship.

Her work is published in numerous journals, including Science, Technology, and Human Values; Policy & Society; Ethnicity & Health; and the Annals of the American Academy of Social and Political Science and reported on in national and international news outlets, including NBC News, Fast Company, WIRED, Slate Magazine, CBC, CNET, The Guardian, National Geographic, and Nature.

Sponsored by The Laura C. Harris Series and Co-sponsored by the following departments and programs: Anthropology, Black Studies, Computer Science, English, History, Philosophy, and Women’s and Gender Studies.