Global Health Colloquium

Ruha Benjamin, Ph.D., Department of African American Studies, Princeton University

Ruha Benjamin is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton, specializing in the critical study of science, medicine, and biotechnology, race-ethnicity and gender, health and biopolitics. She is a Faculty Associate in the Program on History of Science, the Global Health Program, the Center for Health and Wellbeing, the Program on Gender and Sexuality Studies, and the Department of Sociology. Benjamin is also a Research Associate at the Centre for Indian Studies in Africa at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Benjamin’s book, People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013), 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. She is currently working on a new project Provincializing Science: Mapping and Marketing ‘Difference’ After the Genome, which examines the 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 into research on health disparities. Taken as a whole, her body of work addresses debates about how science shapes the social world and how people can and should engage science, grappling with the fact that what may bring health and longevity to some may threaten the dignity and rights of others.

Lunch will be served beginning at 11:45am

Organized by the Global Health Program.
Co-sponsored by the Department of African American Studies, the Center for Health & Wellbeing, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and the Department of Anthropology.