Conference

Ruha Benjamin | 16th Annual Anne & Loren Kieve Distinguished Lecture

Speaker
Ruha Benjamin
Michele Elam
Date
Thu May 20th 2021, 4:00 - 5:30pm PDT
Location
ONLINE-ONLY EVENT
Event Sponsor
Sponsored by the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity; Co-sponsored by the Digital Civil Society Lab, the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, and Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence.

The 16th Annual Anne & Loren Kieve Lecture will feature leading scholar of technology and racial justice, Ruha Benjamin, Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Founding Director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. Prof. Benjamin's work uncovers the ways that emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy, while helping to chart their liberatory possibilities.

Following the lecture, Prof. Benjamin will be joined for a conversation with Michele Elam, William Robertson Coe Professor in the Humanities, Faculty Associate Director, Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and faculty affiliate of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity (CCSRE).

Since 2005, the Annual Anne & Loren Kieve Distinguished Lecture at Stanford's Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity (CCSRE) has brought leading public intellectuals, artists and advocates to address the Stanford community on vital issues and timely topics about race. This year, the lecture is the culmination of the 2021 Tech and Racial Equity Conference: Anti-Racist Technologies for a Just Future

The lecture and conference are free and open to the public. The same registration will be used for both.

Ruha Benjamin's 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 earned a 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 2020 Freedom Scholar Award, and the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton. For more information please visit www.ruhabenjamin.com

Michele Elam is William Robertson Coe Professor in the Humanities, Faculty Associate Director, Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI), and faculty affiliate of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity (CCSRE). Elam’s research in interdisciplinary humanities connects literature and the social sciences in order to examine changing cultural interpretations of gender and race. Her work is informed by the understanding that racial perception in particular impacts outcomes for health, wealth and social justice. More recently, her scholarship examines intersections of race, technology and the arts. “Making Race in the Age of AI,” her most recent book project, considers how the humanities and arts function as key crucibles through which to frame and address urgent social questions about equity in emergent technologies. She is teaching a new course, "AI + Arts + Activism" in spring 2021.