UC Berkeley alumna Ruha Benjamin, “a transdisciplinary scholar and writer,” has been awarded a 2024 MacArthur Fellowship for “illuminating how technology reflects and reproduces inequality and championing the role of imagination in social transformation,” the MacArthur Foundation announced this week.
The MacArthur Fellowship, often referred to colloquially as the “genius grant,” is awarded annually to 20 to 30 talented individuals across a range of disciplines. The $800,000 stipend is intended to support recipients in furthering their work, although fellows are free to use the funds however they choose. The MacArthur Class of 2024 has 22 fellows.
Professor Benjamin earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology and anthropology from Spelman College, followed by a master’s and Ph.D. in sociology from UC Berkeley. She also completed postdoctoral fellowships at UCLA and Harvard. She is currently the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and the founding director of the university’s Ida. B Wells Just Data Lab.
Benjamin’s work focuses on how “advances in science, medicine, and technology reflect and reproduce social inequality. By integrating critical analysis of innovation with attentiveness to the potential for positive change, Benjamin demonstrates the importance of imagination and grassroots activism in shaping social policies and cultural practices,” according to the MacArthur announcement
“At the heart of all my work is the invitation to imagine and craft the worlds we cannot live without, just as we dismantle the ones we cannot live within,” she said in the announcement.
Her research has appeared in prominent journals such as Science, American Journal of Law & Medicine, and Science, Technology & Human Values. She has delivered TED and TEDx talks and has contributed to publications including The New York Times,The Washington Post, CNN, and The Guardian, according to a Princeton University press release
Professor Benjamin joins two other genius grant fellows from Berkeley Sociology: Professor Loïc Wacquant (MacArthur Class of 1997) and Arizona State University Sociology Professor Jennifer Carlson (MacArthur Class of 2022), who received her Ph.D. in sociology from Berkeley.
“From her early days in graduate school, Ruha shone like an intellectual diamond,” Professor Wacquant said. “She exemplifies the best of Berkeley Sociology: big questions, bold thinking, rigorous research and a wide public impact. What more could we ask for?”
Benjamin is also the author of several award-winning books. “Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code” earned the 2020 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award and the 2020 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction, while her 2022 book, “Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want,” won the Stowe Prize. Her other works include “People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier” and “Imagination: A Manifesto,” the press release stated.
In addition to the MacArthur Fellowship, she has received numerous prestigious fellowships, grants, and accolades throughout her career, the press release stated, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation and Group Health Fund Freedom Scholar Award, as well as fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies and the National Science Foundation, among others.
