Laura C. Harris Series

Ruha Benjamin
"Not All Speed is Movement”: Innovation, Inequity, and Imagination in the 21st Century 
February 27, 2025 (Thursday)
Slayter Auditorium 
7:00 PM

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, Dr. Ruha 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?

Ruha 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, knowledge and power. She recently released her fourth book, Imagination: A Manifesto. At the center of all Dr. 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.”

Dr. Benjamin earned 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 & 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.

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 Ronneberg Lecture Series, and the following departments and programs: Anthropology, Black Studies, Communication, Computer Science, English, History, Philosophy, and Women's and Gender Studies.

Cristina Masters
On Butler & Butler: Liveability, vulnerability and non-violence
March 11, 2025 (Tuesday)
Burton Morgan Lecture Hall 115
7:00 PM

Thinking with Octavia E. Butler and Judith Butler, Dr. Masters will talk about her work on feminist (non-violent) resistance to war, as well as her recent scholarship, including two new books, a co-edited volume, Writing Saved Me: When the International Gets Personal (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023), and a co-authored book, Ripping, Cutting, Stitching: Feminist Knowledge Destruction and Creation in Global Politics (Rowman & Littlefield, 2023).

Dr. Cristina Masters is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics at the University of Manchester in the UK, prior to which she held a lectureship in the Department of Politics and a sessional lectureship in Women Studies at McMaster University in Canada. Dr. Masters completed her PhD at York University in Toronto, Canada. Recently, she has been awarded a Postgraduate Diploma and Senior Fellowship in Higher Education in the UK. She is the current Section Chair of the Feminist Theory and Gender Studies (FTGS) of the International Studies Association (ISA), and the co-editor of the book series, Creative Interventions in Global Politics, with Rowman & Littlefield.

Dr. Masters teaches on the coloniality of gender, war and militarism, and critical approaches to global politics and security studies. She is also interested in inclusive and decolonial pedagogies and is co-founder of the Inclusive Schools Project in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Manchester. 

Dr. Masters’ research focuses on making feminist sense of practices of war with special attention to the US military and the role of technology in war, and more recently practices of everyday war in the ongoing war on terror and its various and violent embodiments. Her research is also interested in feminist knowledge production and resisting dominant modes of knowing and being. She is currently working on a Routledge Companion Handbook, Gender and the Politics of Violence, with Marysia Zalewski and shine choi.