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Professional Development

Race, Research and the Power and Peril of Big Data

In this recorded keynote from the 2020 Annual Research Meeting, Dr. Ruha Benjamin reviews how big data and new technological applications can both advance our understanding of health and social problems while simultaneously perpetuating racism and inequality.

Framing her remarks with the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Ruha Benjamin traces the historically racist traditions of medicine and how that tradition carries on in the relationship between race and technology. Dr. Benjamin describes what she calls "the New Jim Code" as technology processes that result in engineered inequity, default discrimination, coded exposure and techno benevolence. She concludes with three action items noting that because injustice is woven into the very fabric of our society, there are many opportunities to change the patterns & systems that perpetuate it.

  1. Identify forms of coded inequity
  2. Manage new patterns of thought and action in the fine print.
  3. Work with others to remove inequity and enact just alternatives.
Free

Enjoy this presentation? Be sure to read Dr. Ruha Benjamin's latest book, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, and give it a review on Amazon.

Ruha Benjamin
Presenter

Ruha Benjamin, Ph.D.

Associate Professor of African American Studies - Princeton University

Dr. Ruha Benjamin is Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founder of the J... Read Bio