Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University
Assistant Professor
Princeton, New Jersey
ruha@princeton.edu
Office:
(609) 258-6936
Expert In
Bio/Research
Ruha Benjamin specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and biotechnology; race-ethnicity and gender; biopolitics and the sociology of knowledge. She is the author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013), which exami...
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Bio/Research
Ruha Benjamin specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and biotechnology; race-ethnicity and gender; biopolitics and the sociology of knowledge. She is the author of People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013), which examines the tension between innovation and equity in the context of state investment in stem cell research and against the backdrop of medical experimentation on subordinate social groups. Her current work is moving in two directions: Provincializing Science: Mapping and Marketing ‘Difference’ After the Genome, investigates the scientific, commercial, and popular uptake of genomics in South Africa, India, and the United States, with a focus on how and why racial-ethnic and caste categories are incorporated in research on health disparities. Papers related to this project are published in Policy & Society, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and Reimagining Biomedicalization, Pharmaceuticals, and Genetics: Old Critiques and New Engagements. In Black to the Future: An Imagination Incubator, Ruha is experimenting with science fiction as a site of sociological knowledge and praxis. This includes courses, workshops, and publications that explore how the arts, activism, and scholarship can be integrated for research and design of alternative social realities. A short story sketch related to this project is published in Discover Society. Taken together, this body of work addresses debates about how science and technology shape and are shaped by the social world. Ruha 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, and the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine among others. She is also an Honorary Research Associate at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
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