Public Lecture with Professor Ruha Benjamin

Public lecture with Professor Ruha Benjamin;

Followed by a panel conversation with Distinguished Professor Bronwyn Carlson (Head of the Centre of Critical Indigenous Studies at Macquarie University), Professor Alana Lentin (Western Sydney University) and Dr Thao Phan (ANU) moderated by Dr Sherene Idriss (ICS Borders and Migration research program co-convenor)

Event Time:

5.30-7pm (followed by refreshments)

Doors open 5pm

Refreshments served after the event

Event Location:

Western Sydney University, Peter Shergold Building

Parramatta Square, 169 Macquarie Street Parramatta

Level 9

Who Gets to Write the Future?  

From Artificial Intelligence to Abundant Imagination

Proponents of artificial intelligence often present it as both “just a tool” that can be used for good or ill and The Future™ of everything—“get on board or get left behind.” But whose ideas, languages, and values are shaping the futures AI makes possible? This talk invites us to take a closer look at the stories and assumptions embedded in emerging technologies and to ask what becomes possible when we move beyond tired old cultural scripts repackaged as shiny new innovation. Drawing on critical AI literacy and critical language inquiry, Ruha Benjamin challenges us to cultivate an abundant imagination capable of envisioning futures that are more expansive, just, and… unpredictable.

Ruha Benjamin is a transdisciplinary scholar, educator, and cultural worker. She is professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. Her work examines how science, medicine, and technology reflect and reproduce social inequities, while highlighting creative forms of resistance and reimagining through which people challenge dominant systems and seed more just futures. 

Ruha is the award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (2019), Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want (2022), and Imagination: A Manifesto (2024) among other texts. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and honors including the Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton, and the MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship. 

Taken together, Ruha’s work invites us to imagine and craft the worlds we cannot live without, even as we dismantle the ones we cannot live within.