This public lecture, hosted by the Centre for Research in Digital Education, is part of the Stewart Alan Robertson Lecture Series funded by the Robertson Endowment.
23rd June 2025, 5:30-7pm
Speaker: Professor Ruha Benjamin (Princeton University)
Chair: Professor Sian Bayne
In person (room 2.55, Edinburgh Futures Institute, The University of Edinburgh) and online (MS Teams)
Lecture abstract
From automated decision systems in healthcare, policing, education and more, technologies have the potential to deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to harmful practices of a previous era. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech predictions with historical and sociological insight.
When it comes to AI, Ruha shifts our focus from the dystopian and utopian narratives we are sold, to a sober reckoning with the way these tools are already a part of our lives. In so doing, she considers how higher education is ground zero for re-imagining and re-tooling the default settings of technology and society.
Speaker
Ruha Benjamin is Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), and Imagination: A Manifesto (2024). She is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton, and most recently the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship. For more info, visit www.ruhabenjamin.com