Career
Benjamin received her Bachelor of Arts in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College before completing an MA and then her PhD in sociology at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA's Institute for Society and Genetics in 2010 before taking a visiting faculty fellowship at the Harvard Kennedy School's Science, Technology, and Society Program. From 2010 to 2014, Benjamin was assistant professor of African-American studies and sociology at Boston University.
In 2013, Benjamin's first book, People's Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier, was published by Stanford University Press. In it, she critically investigates how innovation and design often build upon or reinforce inequalities, including how and why scientific, commercial, and popular discourses and practices around genomics have incorporated racial-ethnic and gendered categories.
In 2019, her book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code was published by Polity. In it, Benjamin focuses on ways in which social hierarchies, particularly racism, are embedded in the logical layer of internet-based technologies. She develops her concept of the "New Jim Code", adapted from Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, to analyze how seemingly "neutral" algorithms and applications can replicate or worsen racial bias.
Race After Technology won the 2020 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Prize awarded by the American Sociological Association Section on Race & Ethnic Relations and the 2020 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction, and was an honorable mention for the 2020 Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Book Award.
Benjamin is a professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Her work focuses on science, technology, medicine, race, citizenship, knowledge, and power. In 2018, she founded the JUST DATA Lab, a space for activists, technologists, and artists to reassess how data can be used for justice. She is also an associated faculty member of the Global Health and Health Policy program and was on the executive committee of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University.
On September 25, 2020, Benjamin was named as one of the 25 members of the so-called "Real Facebook Oversight Board", an independent monitoring group over Facebook. She was selected by the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing to present the Patrusky Lecture in October 2020.
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