Photo Credit: Cyndi Shattuck
Imagination: A Manifesto
A Moderated Q&A with Dr. Ruha Benjamin
Thursday, Sept. 26, 2024
Ahmanson Auditorium (University Hall 1000)
3:30 - 4:40 p.m.
- About The Lecture
- Our Speaker
- Our Moderator
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A world without prisons? Ridiculous. Schools that foster the genius of every child? Impossible. A society where everyone has food, shelter, love? In your dreams. EXACTLY.
Imagination: A Manifesto is a proclamation of the power of the imagination. It is an invitation to rid our mental and social structures from the tyranny of dominant imaginaries, and a field guide for seeding an imagination grounded in solidarity, in which our underlying interdependence as a species and planet is reflected back at us in our institutions and social relationships.
This book is for organizers and artists, students and educators, parents and professors, realists and dreamers who are ready to take Toni Morrison’s instruction to heart: “Dream a little before you think.”
About the Bellarmine Forum
The Bellarmine Forum is LMU's annual celebration of the life of the mind, offered by the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts. The 2023-24 Bellarmine Forum invites students, faculty, and the entire LMU community to think about how we understand “internationalization” and how to break it down into what that actually means to us.
Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American studies at Princeton University where she specializes in the interdisciplinary study of science, medicine, and technology with a focus on the relationship between innovation and social inequity. She is author of four books, including Imagination: A Manifesto (Norton 2024), Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (Princeton University Press 2022), winner of the 2023 Stowe Prize, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Polity 2019), winner of the 2020 Oliver Cromwell Cox Book Award for antiracist scholarship and the 2020 Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize for Nonfiction, People’s Science: Bodies and Rights on the Stem Cell Frontier (Stanford University Press 2013), and editor of Captivating Technology: Race, Carceral Technoscience, and Liberatory Imagination in Everyday Life (Duke University Press 2019).
Professor Benjamin received her 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 and Genetics and Harvard University’s Science, Technology, and Society Program. She has been awarded fellowships and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, National Science Foundation, Ford Foundation, California Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and Institute for Advanced Study. In 2017, she received the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton and, in 2020, the Marguerite Casey Foundation Inaugural Freedom Scholar Award.
Chaya Crowder is an Assistant Professor at Loyola Marymount University in the Department of Political Science and International Relations. She received her PhD from the Department of Politics at Princeton University where she also received certificates in African-American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies. Chaya’s research and teaching interests include political behavior, race and ethnicity politics, social media and American politics as well as gender and American politics. She uses an intersectional approach in her research to explore the ways that attention to race, gender and sexuality have differential effects on political behavior.