ESC is co-sponsoring a special online lecture and conversation with Professor Ruha Benjamin on Thursday, June 4, from 10:00–11:00 AM ET as part of Digital IDEAS 2026 at The Digital Studies Institute. Because this event is being hosted as part of the Digital IDEAS Summer Institute, attendance is limited, and registration is required. Please Register Here. Additional event details and access information will be shared with registered attendees.

Digital IDEAS is the DSI’s annual interdisciplinary summer institute exploring the cultural, social, and political dimensions of digital technologies. This year’s theme, AFTER, considers questions of aftermaths, afterlives, afterworlds, and the hereafter through collaborative dialogue, creative experimentation, and critical inquiry.

Ruha Benjamin is the Alexander Stewart 1886 Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founding director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and award-winning author of Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code, Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, and her recently released fourth book, Imagination: A Manifesto. Ruha is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Marguerite Casey Foundation Freedom Scholar Award, the President’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at Princeton, and in 2024 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship.

Ruha Benjamin’s scholarship and public work on race, technology, justice, and imagination have profoundly shaped conversations across the humanities, social sciences, arts, and computing fields. We are honored to welcome her to this year’s institute.

Digital IDEAS 2026 is co-sponsored by ESC and other partners on campus, including:

The Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, Department of American Culture, Department of English Language and Literature, Department of Film, Television, and Media, Department of Sociology, Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Life Changing Education, Michigan Institute for Data & AI in Society, School of Information, and Sweetland Center for Writing.